➜ BITS on Saturday 26 May 2012 was more or less as gratifying as the day before. There were, of course, the same team of staff pacing the hallway, but with a change of shirt. Now, if you came across a staff, you would be posed with a humorous question, which was screened to front of the t-shirt — ‘Am I your type?’. A very fine way to start a typographic day indeed.

The first speaker was a Chinese designer, researcher, and educator based in Hong Kong, Keith Chi-hang Tam. Coming from Hong Kong, it was no surprise that he spoke fluent English. And as a person who lives in a bilingual culture, it was quite understandable that he should be offering an insight in this area. Keith started off showing some of his works and talking a little about his background as a teacher and researcher. However, he quickly approached the key issue of his lecture — vernacular typographic culture in Hong Kong. He was deeply interested in the way the Chinese and English culture merged and how writing tools were applied to each language. Watching his slides moved from one to the next, we could see how types were vernacularly used in Hong Kong. Handwriting and calligraphy have their own charm, and one could appreciate the power and confidence put into each stroke. They were far more emotional than print. But as we all know, print production is cheaper, thus it will continue to replace the traditional methods of signmaking. The bilingual culture, on the other hand, will probably be alive for a very long time. It is imbued in the city’s history. But how do you combine two languages together when the difference is both visual and spatial? There is probably no correct way to do it, only that one may be better than the other. As shown in his slides, there are currently dozens of ways to display Chinese and English together. As a researcher, he continues to search for the most effective solution, experimenting and developing comparative charts for the two languages, outlining which characters are transferable and which are not. In his own words, he stated that he did not do research for research’s sake, but rather research to benefit designers. In Thailand, there is currently no such research even though we suffered from the same situation, though to a lesser degree. Whether they’re advertisements, signage, logos, magazines, or websites, they are more than often unnecessarily bilingual. Unlike Hong Kong, we have never been colonized and don’t really have the mixed-culture history as an excuse. So why?

As we were reflecting on our own culture, Anuthin Wongsunkakon announced the second speaker of the day, Anisa Suthayalai. Similar to Tnop, this Thai lady was employed at Segura Inc. and is currently working in the US. Founder of Default, a graphic design firm based in New York and Bangkok. A steady, calm, and soft-spoken person, strangely unlike what her works exhibit. However, in this conference, she did not present her commercial projects. Instead, she had produced a series of typographic exploration especially for this lecture. No one would argue that she is an excellent graphic designer. But to display herself as a typographer is a different story. She did not feel comfortable as a type designer so she decided to push herself a little by doing a personal type project — designing fonts for friends. She first sent them questionnaires, consisting a list of questions to draw out their personality. After getting the answers she would combine them with her own knowledge of the person and begin developing the font for him or her. She did that for several of her friends and later asked them to deduce the origin of the font. It resulted in what appeared to be quite an entertaining project. Most of her friends loved the way she depicted them as a font, while one person jokingly prefer to have a different version as it portrayed the side she wasn’t too proud of. The last of the series was not based on a person but a plant, spice cactus, and for the sole reason that it was her friend for the longest amount of time — 3 months. She did admit that she was unable to raise any plant for long. At the end of her lecture, someone asked her a question everyone was wondering about — if she were to be a font herself, what would it be like? Her answer? Plainly simple.

Asia, US, and now, Europe. Our next speaker, Akiem Helmling, is a member of the European-based design collective Underware. The collaboration spans across three different cities including Den Haag, Amsterdam, and Helsinki. A large, sturdy, and composed fellow, he spoke in a somewhat monotonous voice but confident and full of intriguing stories and humor to keep our attention. He started us off with a little introduction of Underware and a few of its more approachable works, including Sauna — a typeface for all sizes with an overly complex type specimen book. Usually, type specimen books are produced to advertise the font but this particular book, Read Naked, is a design piece in its own right. Made from a very special and expensive paper normally only used for passports, printed with heat-sensitive ink, and offering design stories and bits of humor, the book was cleverly and painstakingly designed to be readable in a sauna. It was perfectly washable, rinsable, ovenable, and microwaveable. He also introduced us to Lisa, a semi-interactive script font that changes its characters in realtime as you type. To be more specific, it resembled the way we traditionally calligraph and the rhythm in relation to the amount of ink used. If these sound a little complicated, it is. But all these happens automatically and requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. Coming back to the title of his lecture, Everything That Can Happen In A Day, which was borrowed from the book of the same name, Akiem brought up a few nonsensical but comically creative ideas. For a designer, it may be a way to try something out-of-the-ordinary and for the fun of it. One such idea was to ‘design a typeface nobody wants to use’, which resulted in Fakir, a 21st century blackletter with eccentric letterforms that would appeal to only a handful of people. After the typeface, it was ‘a book that nobody wants to read’. The project was initially approached by an author named, Ruud Linssen, who questioned Underware why they designed a font nobody wanted to use. In other words, why did they wish to suffer voluntarily? The result was the book, ‘Book of War, Mortification, and Love’ — a compilation of essays on voluntary suffering. And to go even further, the entire book was printed in the author’s blood. Many of Underware’s works, in fact, depict a design approach in which the production process is fundamental to their success and completion. Some took months and after many failures to accomplish. For Thai designers who often struggle whenever production tarnishes their ideas, this was certainly a treat to see.

The last speaker brought us back to Thailand. What would BITS be without at least an experimental designer? We had one last year, so obviously, there should be one this year too. Jakkrit Anantakul, a local designer currently working for YouWorkForThem, took the stage late in the afternoon. The way he dressed conveyed an exciting artistic taste, someone who was not timid about exhibiting self-expression and personal style in his designs. Like the other two Thai US-based designers, Jakkrit is not a professional typographer, but a graphic designer by occupation. However, many of his works displayed a passion for typography. As a matter of fact, he collects fonts the sake of collecting them…like art pieces. Some of the typefaces he used in his works may be familiar to us but he often look for ways to express them uniquely, such as subtly bringing the third dimension out of a type in a manner he saw fit without destroying the beauty of its original structure. Aside from working with letters, he spent his time illustrating and sometimes converting them into pi fonts, making them cashable. Another interesting aspect of his work was his utilization of video. Some of his designs were later converted into dynamic forms through animation and video recording. In this country, it’s quite rare to find a motion type designer. You usually find a motion designer or a type designer, but not as a single entity. After the first ten minutes or so, Jakkrit’s presentation started to become a visual showcase without much technical details or elaborated explanations. They were expressive and beautiful in themselves while some may existed for the sake of aesthetics rather than function. In a few cases, he adapted his designs into saleable items such as t-shirts and postcards. Then a question arose — do we buy the item for its function or for the artistic value attached to it? One could say both, but it’s undeniable that the same design on a t-shirt is likely to sell better than on a postcard. It’s a thought worth reflecting especially for the upcoming generation of designers in an industry where design authorship is becoming increasingly important.

To Be Continued….
Looking at the details of BITS MMXI (Part 1)
Looking at the details of BITS MMXI (Part 3)