Mota Italic

Japanese Calligraphy Workshop Recap

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:25:56 +0000

Last week was our first workshop here in our shop/gallery/studio space. Instructed by Keiko Shimoda and organized by Shoko Mugikura, we had an exciting day learning all about Japanese calligraphy.

Shoko began the day with an overview of how Japan’s complex writing systems work followed by examples of historical and contemporary typography. Keiko then presented an introduction to the long tradition of calligraphy in Japan.

After these theoretical basics, it was time to get to get creative. Keiko explained and demonstrated every aspect of the process including the paper, ink-making, brushes, proper handling of brushes, and how to write a few characters in different styles. The participants then spent the morning intently practicing. In the afternoon they chose some simple words to learn to properly write. Keiko nicely concluded the workshop with a helpful group critique of everyone’s work.

Japanese Calligraphy Workshop

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:13:20 +0000

Shoko Mugikura of Just Another Foundry teamed has kindly organised a Japanese calligraphy workshop by Keiko Shimoda to be held here at Mota Italic!

The main details:

19th January 2013, Saturday, 11am

- Max. 8 participants

- 4-5 hours

- The workshop will be in English and all necessary tools are provided

- Please bring €20 to cover the cost for the writing tools and paper

The workshop is intended for those who have interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy but never had the opportunity to try it. Even if you don’t know anything about Japanese language, not to worry – we’ll have a short introduction of the Japanese writing systems by Shoko, as well as an explanation of the history and theory of Japanese calligraphy by Keiko.

But the workshop is mostly about practising – it is a wonderful opportunity to learn new writing systems, skills and methods developed in the Far East. You could even try Japanese calligraphy methods to write Latin script.

Keiko is an unusual person to practice both Japanese and Latin calligraphy. Based in London, she produces beautiful invitation cards, certificates and logos etc. in both Latin script and Japanese or Chinese characters. She also sometimes works for films. In fact, you might have already seen her work – her piece appears in the new James Bond Skyfall! To see more her work, please visit her website.

Although not a calligrapher, Shoko will also be around to answer questions on Japanese scripts.

If you'd like to participate, please email to:

workshop_01_2013@justanotherfoundry.com

Update: There is only a space or two left!

Update 2: The workshop is now fully booked!

OMG Goodbye 2012

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:36:52 +0000

Well, 2012 is coming to a close. With only three more days open, we might as well start saying goodbye to the year and start looking towards 2013.

This year was busy – possibly evident by the lack of blog posts we managed to make (this is our second post of the year). Our report for this year is quite similar to last year’s. In short, there was one major type project, more growth of the boutique, and many new exhibitions in our gallery space.

New Fonts:

We finally released our extensive type family Gemma. This fun – but seriously equipped – family has just about everything you could ask for when looking for an informal sans. OK, so it doesn’t have traditional, boring old italics, instead, it comes with 2 sets of awesome rotalics.

The Boutique:

A lot has changed over the last year… most noticeably is a greatly expanded selection of books. We currently have 180 book titles in stock, for a total of about 400 books. This is fairly small for a regular book store, but in our case we carry only the best selection of typography-related books – as opposed to everything that is available.

We are still getting in new things in all the time… Come stop by!

The Gallery:

We held 6 exhibitions here this year!

In January we had “Rotation, Reflection, Repetition, Repetition.”: a project by students of the UdK in Berlin.

>>Images from the installation

New Vintage Digital Vernacular Letters was our first photography-related show. From an open call we selected almost 600 images from 120 photographers from 40 countries.

>> Some pictures of the pictures

Celebrating the release or type family Gemma, we created the {It’s a Font!} installation. Hundreds of neighborhood children helped us color a selection of glyphs from the fonts to fill the wall.

>> Images from the show

For the second time we exhibited the works of this year’s graduates from the University of Reading and the KABK master’s in typeface design for Mastering Type 12.

>> More about the show and the students

Mister K & Franz Kafka joined us here in the autumn. Julia Sysmäläinen’s remarkable exhibition transformed the gallery into a Kafkaesque space full of fascinating stories and creations based on her Mister K typeface.

>> See every angle of the room that Kafka built

Stephen Coles presented a large collection of curated photographs from his chrome lettering “Chromeography” collection.

>> More on Chromeography

Thanks for all your support this year. We are looking forward to continuing to offer more books and typographic merchandise (both in the store and online), and share more interesting and inspiring exhibitions. So, providing the world doesn’t end tomorrow, see you in 2013!

+1 Year & TYPO Berlin Pre-Party

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:39:32 +0000

Let's Party!

Mota Italic opened its physical gallery and storefront the day before TYPO Berlin 2011 and the dual opening party and TYPO pre-party was one of Berlin’s typographic highlights of the year. This time around we are celebrating not only our space's first birthday/anniversary but also (again) Berlin’s biggest and best conference – TYPO Berlin.

The party will be here next Wednesday, May 16th starting at 6pm and going till late. It’ll be the perfect start to the giant TYPO weekend! Be sure to get here early and have some drinks with us!

Cheers!

Happy 2012 - Looking back to '11

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:47:36 +0000

Happy New Year everyone!

2011 was a great (and busy) time for us at Mota Italic. We appreciate all of your support making it an unforgettable year! Here is a quick recap of some highlights in case you missed the news the first time around.

New work:

We began the year by finishing the work on our custom type family for Skoda Auto.

The New Boutique and Gallery:

In May, we opened a boutique and gallery space in Prenzlauer Berg. It has been slowly and steadily growing thanks to Berlin’s awesome design/type community, countless visitors, and all of our friends online!

The shop when we opened in May.

The shop as of December!

Every week, new books and merchandise are coming into the boutique. We recently began adding the books to our online shop, in case you aren’t able to make it to our space in person. Keep checking back, as there are still many more products to upload.

>> The bookshop

We hosted four exhibitions this year in our gallery:

The first was “CAPITAL: Berliner Buchstaben” featuring 27 Berlin-based type designers’ letters illustrated by 27 Berlin-based artists/illustrators/designers.

>> Images from the exhibition

>> Check out the catalog here

“Type Masters” was our second exhibition and the first preview of the typefaces of this year’s graduating master classes of the MATD program from Reading, England and the t]m program in The Hague, the Netherlands

>> The show & links to more of the students’ work

In October, House Industries presented their fine silk screened prints from the Photo-Lettering Inc collection.

>> Images from the PLINC show

For the final show of the year, we made an installation called "Blacklecker: tasty fraktur" featuring 22 of the most significant new blackletter typefaces of the last 21 years.

>> More about Blacklecker here

Next…

We have a lot of plans for 2012 and are really looking forward to it! Get ready for some new fonts, updates to Vesper and Mota Pixel, new exhibitions, and many more books and products to come this year.

The next show "Rotation, Reflection, Repetition, Repetition" starts this week! Stay tuned for more information!

Škoda Auto’s new identity (and custom typefaces)

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:26:07 +0000

Earlier this year Škoda Auto unveiled their completely revamped corporate identity. We were fortunate to play a small role in this rebranding by providing a set of custom typefaces for use in several different key areas. The two year process allowed us to work with not only the Czech Republic’s premier auto company, but also two incredible German design firms, an international ad agency, and a number of other creative individuals from all over the globe.

The initial brief called for three fonts to be used in the cars’ digital displays (instrument control panels, navigation system, radios, etc). The designs would be light, regular, and bold with some rather specific technical requirements: they were to be used in a wide range of pixel sizes, they needed to be optimized for several different rendering methods, and there were significant width restrictions. Keeping these specifications in mind – and factoring in the client’s aesthetic desires: sans serif, squarish, clean, legible, modern, and high-tech – we had some tight parameters in which to begin designing.

While in the middle of creating the screen fonts, there was talk of the upcoming corporate redesign. By this point, our new fonts were progressing nicely, so the decision was made to expand the family for wider use – this would become their primary corporate type family. Before, there had been at least 4 or 5 different families used for various applications, but now was the chance to unify their design style company-wide.

We modified the screen versions to optimize them more for print. Beginning with the regular weight, we lowered the x-height, lengthened the ascenders and descenders, added some details that wouldn’t show up on screen, increased the weight a bit, adjusted individual characters’ widths (no longer having the restrictions imposed by the screen software), completely re-spaced everything, and added kerning. The family was then expanded to include thin and extra bold styles giving it a total of five weights. Finally, matching italics for all were created. These refined print fonts form a key component to the new visual identity of all Škoda’s printed material; by now you should be able to see them in use by most of Škoda dealers/affiliates around the world.

Finally, the smallest – but most immediately recognizable – component to the project was the logotype (only the letters; the symbol was designed by Syndicate). The five simple letters “Š K O D A” underwent more minute revisions and almost took more time than any of the other steps. They started as wider, bolder, more squared versions of the heavy print typeface; but, over the numerous iterations they crept further and further away from the original source. The logotype is now something of its own entity, but still feels like an appropriate part of the family.

My favorite sightings of the new type was the logo being plastered all over the Tour de France :)

Blacklecker: Behind the Scenes

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:59:23 +0000

Here are a few images and comments about the concept, design, and setup of our installation “Blacklecker: tasty fraktur” (November 5 – December 23, 2011).

The basic concept for the exhibition was to show some of the greatest/most influential/most popular/our favorite modern blackletter designs. There have been quite a lot of new blackletter typefaces coming out in the last years, so the selection was difficult. The selected designs were released between 1990 and 2011 plus a couple that are unfinished and not yet commercially available.

Our general guidelines while curating these designs were that they needed to take queues or inspiration from traditional blackletter styles, but to interpret them in new and contemporary ways. So whether the designs were influenced by 90’s grunge, pixels and the digital environment, or trying to blend blackletter and Latin types, they have all expanded the previous boundaries of pre-digital blackletter styles. The second round of selection involved choosing an appropriately wide variety of styles: different weights, widths, inspiration sources, amounts of ‘blackletterness’, text vs. display use, etc.

There are (only) 22 typefaces represented in this installation, although ideally, many more could have also been included. Regardless, through this small cross-section of designs it is clear that the blackletter genre is continually advancing with technology and designer’s tastes and there is still room for more.

After selecting the typefaces and words (more on the word choices below), the layout was made on the computer. The color coding represents the letters’ sizes, distance from the wall, and age of the fonts. The layout is somewhat of a Blackletter Big Bang – the oldest fonts are the largest, more to the outside, and the letters are physically furthest from the wall (as in 3D; more on this also below). The newest fonts are smaller, more central, and closer to the wall.

Pink = 1990-1999; Orange = 2000-2009; Blue = 2010–still unreleased

The letters were laser-cut out of a thick, white card stock. Our obsessive-compulsive intern, Sláva Jevčinová , laid them all out on the floor to help sort the mess back into words.

Then the paper negatives were also sorted.

Slávka painstakingly recombined all the sheets to create one giant stencil.

The final stencil.

We then cut the stencil into several large pieces to attach to the wall.

Beginning to spray paint the counterless letters gold.

Done.

And done.

Gold on dark gray.

It took three people about two days to mount all the paper letters to the wall.

Mounting the letters was incredibly time-consuming due to the 3D aspect. Each word has its own length of foam posts that were cut by hand. There are more than 300 letters averaging 5-10 posts per letter x 2 hand-cut squares of tape per post. This doesn’t include the additional ≈ a million ‘pixels’ in the word “Ökoterror”.

The final piece.

Not all tapes are created equal. We used a few different varieties, but ran out of the best one mid-way through the hanging. For the first several weeks, letters were jumping off the wall. This was the scene the morning after the opening party – by far the worst day. After repairs with a stronger tape (and in some cases additional foam posts), the letters were securely in place for the remainder of the show.

One last comment regarding the selection of words. Being ‘modern’ blackletter designs, we chose appropriately ‘modern’ words and concepts. They were split 50/50 in German and English to accommodate most of our audience. The German words are all official ‘words of the year’ from the 90’s through now - these were voted on each year and they represented popular linguistic trends and buzzwords for that year. The English words are similar; they were either hot topics of the year or were newly included to various dictionaries. In both the English and German, the words range from entertaining to highly political. The words were matched to the typefaces for a variety of reasons: sometimes they were appropriate to the type designer (based on their personality/beliefs), to the intent of the typeface, to the typeface’s style, or simply because the word shows off particularly nice letters from that typeface.

Thank you again to all the designers who sent in their designs. And thanks also to our awesome intern Slávka; without whom the show would have never been up on time!

More about the show can be found here

Now Showing: Blacklecker

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 14:47:51 +0000

For the final show of the year, we present Blacklecker: tasty fraktur. This exhibition is our biggest and best installation so far; you really must come visit if you are anywhere near Berlin! It’s up now and will run until we close for the end of the year holidays – until 18:00 on December 23rd.

We’d like to thank all the participating designers for sending in their 22 awesome blackletter inspired typefaces.

More about the show here.

Making Faces Film Premier / Berlin / Sept. 8th, 2011

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Rich Kegler is currently embarked on a grande European tour to screen his wonderful film Making Faces. He'll be in Berlin next week and we're celebrating with a special typoholic evening! Thursday September 8th come to The Downstairs Kino in Prenzlauer Berg to see the film, meet Rich, and hang with Berlin's hippest type nerds.

What:

Making Faces Film Berlin Premier (One night only!) (OV English)

When:

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Three showings: 19:00, 20:30, & 22:00

Duration: ~45 minutes

Where:

Downstairs Kino

Schliemannstraße 15, 10437 Berlin

(Directly across the street from us)

How much:

Tickets €5 regular / €4 students

+ a free drink compliments of FontShop & FontFont!

There are only 30 seats per show, so come early to get a spot. The theater is also a bar and restaurant; a great place for dinner and hanging out before/after!

Next week: Gallery Opening

Wed, 11 May 2011 21:30:38 +0000

We are pleased to announce the imminent opening of our new studio/gallery/shop next week! Our new residence in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, gives us a unique space to curate and host a number of type-related exhibitions.

Our first show, CAPITAL: Berliner Buchstaben, features the work of 27 Berlin–based type designers as interpreted by 27 local illustrators/designers/artists. This exhibition celebrates not only some of the many talented creatives in Berlin, but also provides a snapshot of the current typographic and visual gestalt found here.

We would like to invite you to join us for our opening night festivities next Wednesday, May 18, from 18:00 – just before the start of Typo Berlin! Stop by, see the show, have some wine, meet many dozens of type designers and illustrators, and catch up with old friends!

The store and gallery will officially open Thursday May 19th.

You can find a bit more information about the gallery and show here.

UPDATE:

Missed the opening party? Check out some pics from the evening to imagine you were here!

New Release: Vesper Hebrew

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:46:16 +0000

We are thrilled to announce the release of Vesper Hebrew today! This new, five font family is the result of a very memorable collaboration with the renowned Israeli type designer and artist Oded Ezer. His impeccable craftsmanship on these designs is both beautiful on its own and also the perfect compliment for Vesper’s Latin counterpart. We are grateful for all of Oded’s hard work and excited to finally share these thoroughly modern typefaces with you!

Vesper Hebrew is available now exclusively through Mota Italic. That being said, these typefaces are also available though Oded Ezer’s foundry under the name “רץ” (Rutz). The fonts have been renamed especially for the Hebrew-speaking community, Rutz meaning “running text,” to help emphasize that this is a workhorse text type family.

For a bit more about the design process and how the project evolved, here are a few words from Oded Ezer:

The first half of the 20th century was quite revolutionary in terms of Hebrew type design. The list of significant serif text typefaces created in those years starts with Frank-Rühl, that was cut around 1908, goes on to the birth of Francheska Baruch’s Shoken in the mid 1940’s, through the creation of the 50’s trio - Koren, in 1957, Hadassah in 1958, David in 1959 - and, in 1965, Narkiss Linotype family. From around that time till now, no significant Hebrew serif text typeface was introduced.

It was quite surprising for me to discover this fact. This can also explain my motivation to find a true contemporary solution for a new text typeface. For quite a long time I was researching 500, 800 and 1,000 years old Hebrew manuscripts, trying different calligraphic approaches, and trying, unsuccessfully, to find an answer to the question: What is the good way to design a classic yet contemporary typeface at the same time?

One day I have stumbled upon Rob Keller’s “The Making of Vesper” article on “I Love Typography”. I have found this font beautiful, but more important - very readable, and with strong character. I felt that this guy’s typeface, designed as his MA graduation project at Reading University, might have some clues as for my own search for the perfect Hebrew serif text typeface. So I wrote to him asking if he would be interested in a Hebrew version to his font, and he happily replied - Yes. We later had the chance to meet in Brno, and I was delighted to find out that he is as great as his font. What excited me most about it was the typical “Hebrew” cutting of this font, whose style reminded me very much the style of the classic Hadassah typeface, but, in a softer and more delicate way. I immediately had the idea to use it’s serif as a starting point for the Hebrew version, and from there, my task became clear to me: To design a flowing, easy to read Hebrew typeface.

Matching the Latin Vesper, Rutz, which means “running” in Hebrew (Same as in “running text”), includes 5 different weights - Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Heavy. This is actually the first Hebrew serif text font family that contains 5 weights. The classic Frank-Rühl, for instance, contains only two weighs - Regular and Bold. Compared with the slightly bolder Frank-Rühl Regular, Rutz/Vesper Hebrew Regular has a lighter color when arranged as text blocks.

So, here is the results of my adventures with creating a new Hebrew serif text font: Vesper Hebrew Light, Vesper Hebrew Regular, Vesper Hebrew Medium, Vesper Hebrew Bold, and Vesper Hebrew Heavy.

– Oded Ezer

A Redesign for Year One

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Motaitalic.com has just received a new outfit for its first birthday!

We have changed every page in some way (not including adding the new top menu and footer) – some are more radically different than others. Behavior uniformity of buttons, links, dropdowns, etc. has been improved as well as the reworking of the CSS to render better on more systems. The font pages have been considerably expanded to show more samples, details, and information about the designs. We still have additional improvements and enhancements in the works, with some major new features coming out in the next couple months.

We’d like to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who has supported during our first year! It has gone quickly and we have accomplished a great deal. We’ve been occupied with several long-term projects (many of which are close to completion!); so please stay tuned because we have a lot of new things to share soon!

Finally, it’s a bit late, but we’d also like to thank our Design Nomad friend, Dav(id) Hubner, who was with us last July. He was a big help back when we were kicking off the site’s redesign and a great guy to share the month with. Happy travels Design Nomad!

Communication Arts Sept/Oct 2010

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Monotype Imaging's "Director of Words and Letters," Allan Haley, wrote a piece for Communication Arts magazine with the theme "Five Young Typeface Designers and Their Former Careers." Rob was honored to be included among four other very talented, "young" designers: Hannes von Döhren, Berton Hasebe, Cristóbal Henestrosa, and Julia Sysmäläinen.

Amazingly, three out of the five designers reside in Berlin. It's a small design community, and this emphasizes how Berlin really is the Type Capital of the World. There are more type designers per sq/km in Berlin than anywhere else...

So, be sure to have a look at Communication Arts' September/October 2010 Design Annual 51 to learn a bit about these five type designers and some of their latest work.

Schrift in Form 2

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Tanja Huckenbeck and Peter Reichard of TYPOSITION invited Rob to take part in the Schrift in Form 2 exhibition in Offenbach, Germany. The show featured thirty-five type designers from all over the world and some of their new work. The show's theme was "Schriftgenuss" meaning "Type Indulgence". The typefaces illustrated one of the designer's favorite recipes—and some of them were to be cooked up by a local restaurant for one of the show's events.

Schrift in Form 2

September 7-19, 2010

Klingspor Museum

Herrnstraße 80, 63065 Offenbach am Main

[Update]

Incase you missed the exhibition, as we did, you can check out a few images of the show and events through TYPOSITION's Facebook gallery and Frank Grießhammer's Flickr set.

TypoLyrics: The Sound of Fonts

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by the makers of Slanted, TypoLyrics presents 175 songs typeset with new typefaces. This book is purely visual, typographic pornography; it also happens to feature three of our typefaces. Each page was made by a different designer or studio and consequently demonstrates a wide variety of quality. They run the entire gambit from extremely intelligent, well executed designs to overly literal interpretations and first-year-design-student-calibre work. It is certainly a nice reference when looking for some typographic inspiration or some new fonts though.

Each musical genre is paired with a different typeface style. The serif designs represent the “Classical” section of the book. Vesper sets the lyrics of Händel's "Hallelujah" and was illustrated by the Berlin-based studio Nepomuk.

On of our unpublished typeface “Unicase Monospace” (misprinted in the book under the name 'Unicase') portrays the Techno song "United States of Love" by Westbam & the Love Committee – and was designed by Sonja.

Finally, Rob created a crayon-rendering of Gemma that sets some lyrics from Aqua’s ’90’s Pop hit “Barbie Girl.” For the uncensored version you'll have to check out the book!

Mota Italic

Japanese Calligraphy Workshop Recap

Japanese Calligraphy Workshop

OMG Goodbye 2012

+1 Year & TYPO Berlin Pre-Party

Happy 2012 - Looking back to '11

Škoda Auto’s new identity (and custom typefaces)

Blacklecker: Behind the Scenes

Now Showing: Blacklecker

Making Faces Film Premier / Berlin / Sept. 8th, 2011

What:

When:

Where:

How much:

'Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century' a documentary film

Next week: Gallery Opening

New Release: Vesper Hebrew

A Redesign for Year One

Communication Arts Sept/Oct 2010

Schrift in Form 2

TypoLyrics: The Sound of Fonts