Typography & Lettering

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Tag: Type design

  • Blancoletters in the exhibition
    “50 years, 50 designers”

    The exhibition “50 years, 50 designers” commemorates half a century of the Faculty of Fine Arts. It showcases a selection of 50 works made by professional designers who studied in that faculty. The inauguration, held on 25 March, was a nice meeting between former students and lecturers of the faculty. The press conference highlighted the high level of graphic design in the Basque Country and the unquestionable social role of design in improving our lives and our environment.

    Entre esos trabajos seleccionados se encuentra la familia tipográfica Harri, en sus versiones Display y Text. Es uno de los tres proyectos tipográficos presentes en la exposición, y el único que muestra  un proyecto en torno a la tipografía vasca. Ha sido un gran honor y una gran motivación para seguir trabajando el ser seleccionado para formar parte de esta exposición, que se hará itinerante y que va acompañada de la publicación de un libro que recoge todos los proyectos además de las impresiones y explicaciones de sus creadores.

    Harri type family is among the selected works, both in its Display and Text versions. It is one of the three typographic projects in the exhibition, and the only one that shows a project based on Basque lettering. Being selected for this exhibition has been a great honour and gives me great encouragement to keep on working in the field of type design. It will become a travelling exhibition and soon all the projects along with impressions and explanations from their authors will be collected in a book.

    Below you can see part of the interview the Basque public tv channel (ETB) did to some of the selected designers.

  • Akaya multiscript in Google Fonts

    Akaya typeface poster mother language day

    Akaya is now part of Google Fonts catalog. It has been a long way since we started the project in 2015, but it is now available under the Open Font License.

    In its website (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Akaya) you will be able to type your own text in different sizes and check how it looks in Akaya as well as to try combinations and pairings with other fonts in the same catalogue. Enjoy!

  • Harri in Adobe Fonts library

    Harri Display poster for Adobe Fonts

    March 2020 was a hard time for anyone living in Europe due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We had a big thing to worry about and that is probably why I forgot to mention a tiny good news that also happened in March: Harri, the first commercial typeface by Blancoletters made it into the Adobe Fonts Collection thanks to Typo-Ø-Tones. In the Adobe Blog you can read a short note about Harri by Yves Peters:

    https://blog.adobe.com/en/2020/05/28/spring-into-action-with-fresh-fonts.html#type-%C3%B8-tones-brings-stone-letters-to-paper-and-screen

  • Weekly program on Typography in the public
    Basque Radio (Eitb)

    Baipasa radio program presentation

    (Basque version) (Spanish version)

    As a follow up of the interview held in September 2018, I have been invited to collaborate weekly in the public Basque radio to talk about typography in the afternoon show “Baipasa”. It is both an honour and a challenge to have the opportunity to talk about my passion and to spread the interest and knowlegde about type in my community.

    Every Thursday around 5:15 – 5:30 PM we will discuss differents aspects of typography. We started on March 12th with a talk about Times New Roman. Three more programs have been broadcasted since then in which we discovered uses, details and anecdotes around well known typefaces: Comic Sans, Helvetica and Trajan. If you are interested and want to know how Typography sounds in Basque language check the audios below.

    Audio files

    2021/06/24 Road typography

    2021/06/10 Car typography

    2021/06/03 Default typefaces

    2021/05/20 Street typography

    2021/05/06 Basque calligraphers: Pedro Madariaga

    2021/03/25 Women & letterpress

    2021/03/11 Women & calligraphy

    2021/02/25 Emojis 2

    2021/02/18 Emojis 1

    2021/01/28 Luxury & typography

    2021/01/14 Numerals

    2020/12/17 Fat faces

    2020/12/03 Shady characters: @

    2020/11/19 Basque calligraphers: Ioannes de Yciar

    2020/11/05 Typography and elections

    2020/10/22 Font detectives

    2020/10/08 Basque calligraphers

    2020/06/25 Uppercase & lowercase letters

    2020/06/25 Calibri

    2020/06/18 The keyboard

    2020/06/11 Measuring letters

    2020/06/04 Times vs. Arial

    2020/05/28 Tifinagh

    2020/05/21 Verdana

    2020/05/14 Futura

    2020/05/07 Basque Lettering (II)

    2020/04/30 Basque Lettering (I)

    2020/04/23 Blackletters

    2020/04/16 Trajan

    2020/04/02 Helvetica

    2020/03/26 Comic Sans

    2020/03/12 Times New Roman

  • Interview in the Basque Radio

    Image of the radio player
    Sarean #37. Calligraphy, Typography and New Technologies were the three main subjects addressed in the interview.

    Few days ago I was interviewed in Sarean, a radio programme of the Basque Radio in collaboration with Sarean.eus association. We talked mainly about Calligraphy and Typography. We also discussed how new technologies make the production of comercial fonts easier, cheaper and faster. We went through the whole type design process, from the first sketches to the tools used for the final production of digital typefaces.

    Glad to see Typography is gaining presence in my near environment. If you are curious and want to know how “type talk” sounds in Basque, clic on the image or follow this link.

  • Lecture on Tifinagh Type Design
    Sustainability and Minority Scripts (Bilbao)

    Type designer Juan Luis Blanco lecturing on Tifinagh and Arabic multi-script signage at the Second Conference in Graphic Design in Bilbao.
    Type Design as an agent for sustainability. I had the privilege to speak on using **multi-script typography** to empower and normalize minority languages and scripts like Tifinagh. Here, I am presenting a tri-script signage example featuring Latin, Arabic, and Tifinagh. Image: E. Herrera.

    The Second Conference in Graphic Design, organized by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), took place in Bilbao from June 27th to 29th, 2018. Under the theme “Design and Sustainable Society,” I was invited to present a lecture on Tifinagh type design, exploring the unique typographic challenges and opportunities of this North African script.

    The conference explored the intersection of graphic design and sustainability through lenses such as gender, accessibility, and environmental impact. It provided the perfect forum to discuss how type design can help normalize minority languages and scripts in multicultural spaces. Specifically, I focused on giving a contemporary voice to Tifinagh—a script that has been historically marginalized despite its deep roots in North African heritage.

    It was a rewarding experience to introduce this ancient writing system to Basque and Spanish designers and students, many of whom were encountering it for the first time. During the talk, I highlighted recent milestones in multi-script typography, ranging from academic works like my own Amaikha and Redouan Chetouan’s Awal, to the ambitious Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib—a collective project in which I was honored to participate as a type designer.

    The latter project resulted in three award-winning families—Elixir, Qandus, and Tubqal—which represent a major leap forward for Amazigh culture and Tifinagh accessibility. I would like to thank the conference organizers for allowing me to share the story of this fascinating script and its role in a more inclusive, sustainable design future.