Typoclass 2019

For the third time, teacher and typophile enthusiast Boril Karaivanov organised a ten-day workshop in the idyllic UNESCO-heritage village of Bozhentsi, Bulgaria. Boril’s educational efforts in typography are also known through the biennial festival Typofest taking place in Plovdiv & Sofia.

In 2019, he invited Veronika Burian and Erich Rainer Scheichelbauer to lead the workshop in digital typeface design. Far away from city noise and distractions, Veronika started the programme with some analogue exercises to get the students into sketching on paper and exploring their own ideas based on some given parameters. From there the class fine-tuned a small set of control characters on paper and slowly moved to digitising. Little interruptions in form of water-melon snacks and delicious cookies by the local sweets shop were welcomed as a way to relax and re-focus.

Short lectures on best practice letter-drawing, legibility, methodology of spacing/kerning techniques, and the design of diacritics accompanied Veronika’s hands-on guidance during the five days. At the beginning of the workshop students had to select their favourite letter, either from the Latin or Bulgarian alphabet, and draw it in the same design as their control characters. The reason being that, as a final task, students were asked to go back analogue and create an artistic interpretation of their favourite letter. Some of the results were wonderfully ingenious.

Rainer was kind to spend some hours during those five days helping out with technical matters and providing another pair of eyes and opinion for the students. After a one-day break most of the participants continued into the second week of full-on tech geekiness with Rainer and the Glyphs program for designing typefaces.

B&W photos by Rosina Pencheva.