The talk from Bruno Maag was very insightful, he talked a little bit about how he started off studying in the Basel School of Design and was taught by Weingart. They would complete the most simplistic tasks in order to learn and understand rhythm and shapes. One of these tasks was taking a sheet of paper with the word ‘Basel’ letter pressed onto it, cut it up into the individual letters and move them fractionally to explore the spacing. Maag said they did this for weeks which I though was astonishing as they did not lose interest showing their dedication and hunger to learn. He said they focussed greatly on the spacing of typography as people love to create type with minimal spacing or overlap the letters which is a personal pet hate of his. Another example of a task they completed was the repetition of drawing a glass, the aim wasn’t to create the perfect drawing but to feel the essence of it and put in the minimal effort for the maximum output returned.
He then spoke about the training course at Monotype when he joined and how they would spend the first week hand drawing horizontal and vertical lines and at the end of the week, their final lines would be measured with a ruler. If the lines were more than 1mm off, they would have to repeat the week until they could hand render a straight line. Once you passed the line exercise you moved onto circles with the same concept that at the end of the week it was measured with a compass. I personally think the dedication to that is incredible as people could spend multiple weeks just drawing lines and circles by hand until they were perfect so their hand rendered skills were exquisite. He took this inspiration from Monotype and now uses it for his own company ‘Dalton Maag’ having everyone complete a 3 month training course. This teaches their employees how the small details can make such an impact and strengthen their relationship with hand drawing work.
Bruno Maag also said that the audience you attract and work to engage is important. As much as you may want to design for an audience of 20 year olds because that is your interest and age group, it is important to look at where most of the audience of the project and the would population sit. For example most Europeans are between the ages of 40 and 55 so it is important we design for that age range in mind, taking into considering accessibility such as poor eyesight. This part of the presentation was really insightful to me as I had never really thought about how our design impacts the different age ranges and people worldwide. Another staggering figure he spoke about was the 7 times more people used android than apple so as much as we want to design for the latest tech of apple, we should also be looking at the lowest spec of android and how it runs on that. Saying that it must run on every device shape and size.
Going back to spacing of your typography, he spoke about the scientific research that the eye plays a fundamental part in how type is read. I thought to myself well, yes we use our eyes to read so obviously we do but it stems a lot deeper than that. It looks at the rods and cones for colour vision, the visual word form area of the brain and how your brain understands the reading and writing and how dyslexia isn’t actually impacted by your ability to read but the ability to hear different sounds and words. So bigger letters can use a tighter spacing while smaller letters need a wider spacing to help improve the legibility, readability and make it easier for the brain to decode the letter forms.
Overall, I found this very insightful as it allowed me to learn a more deeper understand of typography and how our eyes and brain interpret it. In the future when using typography for my projects I will also look at my font choices more as well as how it contrasts with others, the size and spacing I use and the type sizes I choose.