Sydney Festival 2023/24
Photo: Karin Wagner. License: All Rights Reserved.
I came across Area at the Sydney Festival, where its Inktrap styles are used as a display typeface in all types of communication. It appears on signs about town, in printed material, and on the website. It is a good example of what I am writing about in my book From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age, how typefaces that begin as special technical solutions are being used creatively for other purposes than originally intended.
ink traps were originally introduced to prevent clogging of letterfoms when printed on poor quality paper at high speed and in a small size. Tobias Frere-Jones, designer of Retina – a typeface with inktrap styles as an aid for legibility of small type in print and on screen, said in an interview that he could imagine his micro sizes being used for “very, very large sizes seen at a great distance”.
In Sydney, it is neither used for very small print in The Wall Street Journal nor for road signs on motorways, but instead something in between.
Source: www.instagram.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: www.sydneyfestival.org.au License: All Rights Reserved.
Sydney Festival website, 2024
Photo: Karin Wagner. License: All Rights Reserved.
Source: issuu.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Screenshot from the 2023 festival report
This post was originally published at Fonts In Use