I recently had the pleasure to talk with Ale Paul, the highly talented type designer about his new typeface Bellissima, how he feels about other designers implementations of his fonts, his technique for calligraphic typefaces and his top 5 typefaces of all time.

Bellissima Script is your new typeface. Where did your inspiration for this typeface come from?

Before Bellissima I designed a few calligraphic typefaces following different schools or styles like Burgues Script, Compendium, Poem Script or Business Penmanship. Bellissima began from an entirely different thread as those fonts. It started with Alex Trochut generously showing me a gorgeous lettering book from his grandfather’s library: Bellezas de la Caligrafía, by Ramón Stirling, 1844. Stirling was one of the Latin calligraphy pioneers who introduced a refined version of English calligraphy in Spain and made it popular in the nineteenth century.

My intention was to veer away from Stirling’s exuberant ornamentation, and work within simplified forms of his ideas. As it usually is with most of my projects, Bellissima became its own bird and shaped its own flying patterns. Suddenly there were many ligatures, multiple endings and swashed connections, hundreds of alternates for both uppercase and lowercase. Bellissima has an effusive energy that appeals much beyond its sourcing. It’s intended for these modern times of appreciation for old crafty things like stationary and letterpress, where its origins help it shine brightly.

Is there are any special considerations when designing a typeface on a computer that is meant to look like it is written by a calligraphic hand?

Yes, you should be perfect in technique details as connections and space between letters. And I think is very important to understand how the hand and writing works and reflect some of the imperfections of it. It should be as much imperfect as the human is but structured by the technology.

As a designer I feel typography is the most important element of any design, it makes or breaks it for me. When designing type do you ever take in consideration how other designers may implement your fonts?

Yes, I think as a graphic designer user in every font I design. I imagine uses and play with it, every glyph I do I try words and imagine a context and its results. My typefaces are not neutral and are very focused in a concept and this concept includes the use.
About the use, at the beginning, I was very critic with some ways the designers were using my fonts but after a while I relaxed and let it be. There are some very good designers that makes your fonts looks better than I imagined them too, they play with them and sometimes they add extra elements than improve the use a lot. So its a balance. Fonts are a resource as colour is another. Some people can use cyan or magenta in a good or bad way.

A question I want to ask every type designer. What are your top 5 favorite typefaces?

Its not easy to answer this. It depends of the use and of course I will not mention my own fonts.
So, being totally unfair with many others I will select FF Tartine, Tangier, Avenir, Bickham Script and Regal Display.

I want to thank Ale for taking the time to speak with us about his work, and process. You can see more of Ale’s wonderful typefaces here. You can also stay up to date with his future type endeavors by following him on twitter & dribbble.

YCN launches brand new Professional Awards with glittering Call for Entries campaign by Craig Ward.

Emerging creatives around the world are invited to share the best of their work as part of a brand new professional award programme from YCN, launched in international partnership with Soho House.

Since 2001 YCN has been operating an international award programme for creative students. YCN is now seeking to elevate and recognise outstanding talent rising up within the industry.

Open to creative professionals to have graduated within the last 8 years, the new YCN Professional Awards invite the submission of a portfolio showing four projects into categories for Design & Communication, Illustration and Animation. Portfolios must include client work, and postgraduate students are also welcome to enter. The deadline for doing so is March 28th 2013.

All portfolios will be considered by an inspring international jury, undergoing two rounds of online consideration followed by jury days hosted in Soho House London and New York. The 80 strong multi-disciplinary group combines established and newer names; including Creative Review editor Patrick Burgoyne, Sagmeister & Walsh’s Jessica Walsh and Blink founder James Studholme. Up to 30 winners will be identified overall.

YCN has internationally partnered with Soho House to host the jury days followed by launch events for a new YCN Annual. This hard-backed publication, to be Art Directed this year by Matt Willey, will showcase all Award winners alongside other notable submissions and be distributed across the creative industries. Winners will also be showcased online at the YCN website and invited to speak at industry facing events and screenings at Soho House venues internationally.

“We believe that well organised Award programmes have a valuable role to play in sharing brilliant new creative work and publicly recognising those behind it”, comments YCN Founder Nick Defty.

“We have set out to design something far-reaching and accessible that will give recognition to some of the most exciting talent coming through. Our partnership with Soho House will enable us to further celebrate this talent in beautiful spaces around the world”.

This year’s Call for Entries campaign, and a glittering interactive physical award, have been designed in collaboration with New York based typographer Craig Ward. Combining striking type with imagery of the award itself the campaign invites creatives around the world to ‘Shake it Up’.

“I photographed a tonne of falling glitter which is rather difficult to focus on!”, tells Craig. ”I built the type out from there. The most important thing I wanted to capture was the energy and excitement of rising up as a creative”.

The Awards cost £40 to enter and all those who do will become Super Members of YCN with colourful benefits for a year. “We want to make sure that everyone that enters gets great value from doing so” says Nick.

Entries are invited online by March 28th 2013. Full details can be found at ycn.org/awards

ABOUT YCN

Established in 2001, YCN is a member based organisation dedicated to empowering and celebrating creative talent internationally. YCN is free to join, and anyone can do so at ycn.org. YCN’s members are drawn to the worlds of design, advertising, illustration, animation and all creative business in-between.

ABOUT SOHO HOUSE

Soho House was founded in London, in 1995, as a private members’ club for those in film, media and creative industries. The group has since expanded to include Houses across Europe and North America.

ABOUT CRAIG WARD

Craig Ward is a British Designer and Art Director today working in New York. Known primarily for his delightfully innovative and experimental typography, Craig is a former ADC Young Gun winner and recipient of the TDC’s Certificate of Typographic Excellence.

ABOUT MATT WILLEY

Matt graduated from Central St Martins in 1997, before joining the internationally acclaimed studio Frost Design, later becoming Creative Director. In 2005 he co-founded Studio8 Design with Zoë Bather. Matt is co-founder of Port Magazine which launched in February 2011.

For interview and image requests, or for any further information, please contact YCN Project Director Zoë Barrett on +44 (0)20 7033 2140 / zb@ycn.org

What prompted you to start your own type foundry?

This will be my fourth foundry now. Not many people know this, but I started out creating typefaces and doing design. My first foundry was CinaHaus in 1996 and shortly after I joined up with a couple of guys to start Test Pilot Collective. In 2000 I decided to go out on my own and I needed a place to sell my typefaces again. So I started up YouWorkForThem which I sold three years ago. Now that I am starting to release type again, I need a new home for the fonts. Matthew Desmond is also working with me on this venture.

What’s the initial idea behind the font Ramsey?

Ramsey began as just a sketch from some type I saw on an album cover when shopping. I kept redrawing it (I do this a lot) and adding in new characteristics. I never was too serious on it until 9 months ago I realized that there could be something there. So I kept redrawing and tweaking until I ended up with the final face. I feel it is solid and worthy to put my name on.

Working on fonts is hard because when you change one thing, often you have to change 14 other letters to ensure a consistent look. I wanted Ramsey to be really functional for all types of uses. I hate making fonts that have one use to them. I like to think of fonts like they are people, so they have unique characteristics and are multidimensional. I am a designer too so a lot of times I design the extra characters like they are part of something I would have fun using. I am doing this more and more.

Will Associated Typographics be a place you will showcase not only commercial fonts that our purchasable to the public but also custom typefaces?

Yes, that is the overall vision. The fonts will be primarily my solo fonts and faces and the ones I work on with Matthew Desmond. We will also be working together on custom typeface projects under Associated Typographics. We just finished the Disney project earlier this year and it had such a wonderful outcome. We compliment each other very well and have known each other since 1997.

And what’s next, any new fonts we should keep a look out for?

Yes, I have a lot in cue. I wish the day had more hours. I will have a muti-styled stencil family coming out at the beginning of next year. It will be loaded with a lot of little typographic toys. I have a lot of others in the works but I have been focusing on this one for now. I was thinking about taking a little time off this one to see how fast I could build out a font.

I do a lot of branding jobs through agencies and often I am drawing custom type for those projects. I enjoy it because it is just practice drawing new forms that I would not draw on my own. I am also working on some custom letters for a new project I am working on too. We will see if that turns into a typeface or not. It is pretty interesting at this point.

Ramsey can be purchasedhere

Welcome to RoboFont

“I really wanted to see where I could take things. I love the materials and want to keep learning about new ways to manipulate them, whilst retaining a very graphic style. I want to challenge what is possible and continue to move my work forward”.

The new explorations have had a positive impact on Peter’s approach and it is certain will go on to influence future work both in illustration and typographically-led pieces.

Technical details
Hand stitched, and paper cut illustration
Size: 594 x 420mm
Paper: Stockwell Bockingford 420gsm watercolour paper
Thread: 10 individual colours

For serious sales enquiries or commissions please contact Peter direct.
http://www.petercrawley.co.uk

Textaxis. Type design.

Not much information on this but absolutely stunning work.

http://www.textaxis.com

All their fonts are for personal use unless stated. If you would like to use them for commercial you can contact them.

Bespoke type by Village creates a range of custom types in styles, from more traditional (for American Express’s Membership Rewards program) to very contemporary, (for the Syfy television network,) with stops in-between, including the work for the Alliance for Climate Protection, to the typeface we created for the New York City Opera, which IS their brand.

To see more visit: Bespoke Type by Village and Village