Photo © Alexander BlumhoffHis speech dealt with an eclectic range of topics (all delivered flawlessly even without a format visual presentation on screen), from the grading of fonts for the iPad 3, to discussing the new, minimalist IA website (tentatively penned to be launched tomorrow). However, the bulk of his talk focused on his personal experience of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and the aftermath.
Reichenstein was living in Japan, where his IA agency is based, around the time of the quake. Touching on the experiences of the event, and the subsequent aftermath, Reichenstein described how he suddenly “lost optimism”, and was “not sure what to so”. After flying back to Switzerland with his family, and while deciding what to do with the agency, he started designing a logo for a friend. Even though Reichenstein did not consider himself a type designer in the traditional sense, his logo began to develop into a typeface.
Reichenstein’s talk turned to how he went about designing a typeface, somewhat naively at the beginning, and how the process became a ‘therapeutic’ escape from the events that preceded it. As a first time type designer, Reichenstein described the process of trial and errors, and the mistakes made along the way (in particular, his anecdote about the lowercase ‘w’ was particularly funny). Coincidentally, his first breakthrough with the typeface came after discovering an old book on the subject of earthquakes. He copied the handwriting out, turned it into a font and “it didn’t turn out too bad!”. Realising that it was not about just designing the individual letters, but designing the entire page, Reichenstein continued to work and develop the typeface. He compared the process as rhythmic, similar to playing music.
Oliver Reichenstein
Digital Designer (Zurich)
Text by Paul Woods
