Sticks and stones may break your
bones, and they make surprisingly cool fonts!
Chank guided Midwestern designers in the creation of nature fonts
at AIGA Minnesota's Design Camp. More than 50 designers attended Chank's
font-making workshops at the weekend retreat, and together they created
three new inventive free fonts.
Hunting & Gathering
Drawing from his fine art background, Chank encouraged designers to
create "found art" letterforms, using only materials found laying
around the campgrounds in Nisswa, Minnesota. AIGA campers sparked
their creativity by exploring the area looking for leaves, twigs,
flower petals, cigarette butts, rocks, fish bones, wild berries --
anything that might help them fashion attractive new organic letterforms.
Rock, Scissors, Paper... and Glue,
Too!
Once they wrangled up all their materials, the designers set to the
business of transforming three classic Chank Fonts. One class recreated
Chank's Mr. Frisky, a
second class made Swingdancer,
and a third class rebuilt Martin Fredrikson's Sauerkrauto
font. Working from laser proofs of individual letters for guidance,
contributing designers repurposed their found objects into the shapes
of the base letterforms.
The found objects were arranged and mounted on small canvas boards.
The boards were photographed, and the resulting photographs were used
to create the new fonts: Mr.
Twiggy, Twigdancer,
Sauertwiggo.
Voila!
Available both as RGB JPEG files and traditional TrueType fonts, these
resourceful fonts are ready to make their way back to the earth from
whence they came. Consider the JPEGs the clip art of the wild; portraits
of the alphabet in nature's glorious textures and rich colors. The
fonts, on the other hand, capture the many silhouettes of Mother Nature
as simplified outlines that you can easily use to type.
Your Turn!
Now the challenge is to use these fonts in your new designs. Do you
have a project that can make use of these pineconey, flowery initial
caps? Do full-color, jpeg typefaces serve any practical purpose, or
are they a useless typographical flight of fancy? Those questions
are yours to answer. Enjoy these fonts and use them well.
What's This "Design Camp"?
The annual AIGA Minnesota
Design Camp (now in its 20th year) provides an opportunity for experienced
designers to get out of their offices and recharge their creative
batteries in a relaxing and invigorating north woods environment.
For students and designers, Design Camp is a great networking and
learning opportunity.
Thank You
Extra credit goes to Brenda Halvorson
who helped finish the Mister Twiggy font, Bret
Peterson who helped with Sauertwiggo, and Andy
Wood who helped with Twigdancer. Thanks to ALL
the designers who participated in Chank's Design Camp Workshop. Hope
you had as much fun as Chank did!
