2020 Font Collection

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2020 Font Collection - A collection of experimental fonts for 2020

Story
Fonts are awesome, but can fonts be experimental or art? Hi, my name is Harald Geisler, I am a Typographer and Artist. With the 2020 Font Collection, I like to share with you my experimental designs about reading and writing for this season.

I like to think about fonts like fashion. The way one dresses written language can be a personal statement. Think about how you dress up going to a party or when you're going to a first date. In the same way, you choose a font when you write a love letter and a different one when you invite your friends to a rad house party.

The struggle with new. Today I find that most "new" fonts are historical revivals honoring the past, for example, the x-th resurrection and hommage to a classic.


Most of the time classics like Helvetica itself were revolutionary at their time. To stay in the image of clothing: if you pull it off right it can be fun to show off at the party in a 1950s suit. But what is the fitting font for your words this coming season?

Fashion x Fonts. This collection is about exploring possible futures of type design. And I would like this exploration to be fun. The designs of the 2020 Font collection are experimental, fun, pushing writing and readability to its limits.

"Of what use is readability if there is nothing to excite us to take notice of a text?" (W. Weingart 1973)

As an artist, my work often starts with a daydream, in the 2020 font collection I like to work on 5 of these dreams:

1. A font is a portrait of a person
2. Sigmund Freud's handwriting has a nightmare
3. Questioning the way we write with our hands
4. A Miles Davis melody and Andy Warhol philosophy become a font
5. Imagine your personal neutral font

Can a font be a portrait of a person? Dimanche is Sunday in French. The idea for this font came from getting to know a Japanese dancer who worked in France. We met a couple of times and what remained was a lot of fun memories about movement and the wish to capture this unique character in the design of a typeface. It started with the idea of writing an M that would whimsically bend towards the end, seeing that made me smile and remember. Just like a portrait makes you think of a person, the font makes me think of this encounter. And I like to imagine that each letter carries some of that character and unique movement. The variations of each letter come from the same inspiration. Can you spot all the letter variations in the image?



Do fonts dream? In 2013 I created a font that renders Sigmund Freud's handwriting here on →Kickstarter. I spend two weeks at the Sigmund Freud Archive in Vienna to analyze the handwriting of the inventor of psychoanalysis. When it comes to creating a handwriting font it is all about understanding the character and patterns of a writer's movement. Now I like to create a dreamlike variation based on the character, movement, and patterns of Prof. Freud's hand.



In cursive, all lowercase letters connect. What if… we'd live in a world where all words start with a lower case letter, followed by uppercase letters that are connected. The design explores how to transform the writing-movement for uppercase letters to write a seamless uppercase cursive. Here an early scene from the sketchbook:



Imagine Warhol and Davis had a font. "So What" is inspired by a trick from Andy Warhol and a song from Miles Davis. To create the font I locked myself in the studio listening to Davis' "So What" on repeat for 8 hours. What emerged was a concept for a font drawn in four angles, 8 variations, and an algo-rhythm programmed into the font that exchanges the letters as you type, creating a unique pattern for every word you type. Here are some scenes from the sketchbook:


Warhol's trick goes like this:

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say: So what.

“My mother didn't love me." So what. “My husband won't ball me.” So what. “I’m a success but I'm still alone." So what.

I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.

Andy Warhol, →The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975

Stretchgoal:
if the campaign reaches 5050, I will add one more font to the 2020 collection.


I already used this uppercase typeface for my own T-Shirts, Posters, and Editorial design. And it has beautiful numbers:


→Status of the fonts
Some of the fonts are already in use, some are close to finished, others are still on the drawing board. The delivery of the font collection is planned for September 2020. You will receive instructions and a link to download the fonts.

#satisfyingtech #2020fonts #HaraldGeisler