Robothon — GNP seminar
## GNP: Tobias Frere-Jones exhibition ##
The Gerrit Noordzij Prize seminar was a side-event going on Saturday,
following the award ceremony and exhibition opening on Friday. The
exhibition, dedicated to Tobias Frere-Jones’s work, was stunning — huge
posters with beautiful specimens of his myriad typefaces along with some
delightful curios (such as a sample of the restaurant napkins where he
usually sketched his first ideas).
The seminar started with an enlightening perspective on British
historical typefaces by *Paul Barnes* , who went through many revealing
details and differences among time periods to find the appropriate
references to his own type design work.
Following up was House Industries’ *Rich Roat* , going through the history
of their type foundry, encompassing the days of hotrod customising until
their beautiful OpenType contemporary script faces. Rich’s talk was
filled with delightful anecdotes from their work at House Industries,
and among all the great work he showcased, their work from Alexander
Girard’s designs — going from airline corporate ID to shiny children’s
puzzles — was in my humble opinion the gem of the talk. It was also
awesome that Rich had set up a makeshift House Industries store outside
the conference room, with some wonderful freebie mini-catalogues,
stickers and posters (one of which now hangs in my place), and i
couldn’t resist shelling a bit for one of their beautiful Girard tees.
After an introduction by Chris Vermaas, where he playfully recounted
some stories of his working process with ‘Tobi’, it was the turn of
*Tobias Frere-Jones* to hop on the stage. Instead of assuming his (totally
deserved) center-stage role, he went on to humbly but exhaustively
describe the design process of the ___ font he designed for Martha
Stewart Living, taking cues from radically different approaches to type
design, combining slab serifs with ball terminals and thin letterforms.
The final result, as you would expect, was remarkably elegant. The low
profile he showed while going through his presentation totally
contrasted with the notable work of assembling a meaningful and balanced
typeface out of a Frankenstein-like set of inspirations.
The finale would be presented by *Piet Schreuders* , who began by showing
some of his album cover designs but quickly shifted to his interest in
musical research, which often builds the basis of his creative work.
From there he proceeded to tell his wonderful tale of recollecting the
lost remains of Leroy Shield’s musical heritage — Shield was the
composer of the ‘Laurel and Hardy’ movie soundtracks. Among some
impressive stories, including his masterful splicing together of film
parts to obtain full versions of those lost songs, he eventually found
his way to the original sheets of Shield’s creations. A Dutch big band
orchestra, The Beau Hunks, took upon re-recording those jolly songs,
gathering the interest of old-schoolers such as Robert Crumb, who
contributed the artwork to Schreuders’s covers.
The seminar drew to a close with a beautiful surprise — four sax
players went up the stage to play a few of Shield’s songs, and you
definitely had to be there to feel the magic of the moment: a gathering
of typographers being presented with the happy tunes of the American
thirties; i saw a few bemused faces in the audience, but this was the
perfect way to underscore the trans-disciplinary aspect that was present
throughout the Robothon and the seminar, bringing together code, music,
prose, poetry, pictorial archaeology and history to lend meaning to the
ever-exciting fields of typography and type design.