Mark van Wageningen introduced his project: coloured fonts. Historically, type designers have always thought in black and white. Mark finds this black and white world too small and encourages the user to move beyond it. His typefaces facilitate a wide range of motley typographic results. Overlapping and layering of different styles of a type family allows one to make original colourful type compositions.

If you can construct it – you can also deconstruct it

Construction is fundamental for Novo Typo. Anything that can be constructed must also be able to be deconstructed, and vice versa. With their fondness for imperfection, Novo Typo are able to attain very original results. Their voluntary imperfection leads them to resort to various techniques and their stubbornness is more than impressive. It takes a great amount of enthusiasm to be able to spend weeks doing repetitive letterpress letters. As a result, instead of precise offset prints, their colourful compositions with “hairy edges” gain a characteristic style. A further step towards imperfection is their use of a Monotype hot metal typesetting machine.

Novo Typo’s enthusiasm about ancient techniques is only illusive however – the Amsterdam studio is not interested in nostalgia or revivals. They naturally also use the latest technology, and so, their Bixa font is therefore the first chromatic font for the web which allows for computers and new web browsers to use it online.

Written by Radek Sidun •