Interview with the red dot: best of the best winners Remo Caminada and Ludovic Varone

With the “Type Generator” Remo Caminada and Ludovic Varone have developed a programme which enables font designers to generate fonts meeting their requirements with relatively low effort and which has the potential to revolutionise the work with digital fonts. This outstanding achievement was honoured with a red dot: best of the best by the red dot expert jury. Thus Remo Caminada and Ludovic Varone are automatically nominated for the red dot: junior prize, which is awarded to the best student work. Remo Caminada and Ludovic Varone talked about their work in an interview with red dot online.

red dot online: Mr Caminada, Mr Varone, out of 3880 entries from 34 nations only 27 received the red dot: best of the best. You are among them and thus also nominated for the red dot: junior prize, which goes to the best student work in the competition. What does such a nomination mean to you?

Remo Caminada & Ludovic Varone:

a) An inspiration to develop further projects
b) An opportunity to make our project public, this means to get the attention of society and make new contacts both with research colleagues working on similar tasks and future project partners from manufacturing and services industries.

red dot online: What challenge does typography face today and what is the task of today’s font designer?

Remo Caminada & Ludovic Varone: Typography is essentially something conservative and obsolete; it is a set of visual rules which has been clinging to codes of a phonetic language for thousands of years. It has to use a very restricted abstract language of forms to become understandable. This binds designers to many conventions and users first have to commit the character combinations to memory before being able to use them for communication. However, many font designers are trying to advance typography by questioning these norms. On the basis of this understanding again and again interesting fonts are designed which play with or even break the rules of convention. The result is however, that such fonts are partially hard to read. This shows the limitations of typographic freedom. It is therefore interesting to us to explore what other forms of communication could exist besides typography and which still need to be invented or used. In our view this has more innovative potential than redefining typography within its tight restrictions.

We suggest the creation of a new profession in addition to that of font designer, namely that of inventor of different sign languages and pictograph vocabularies, in which writing features as one of several disciplines and has more of an assisting function.

The “Type Generator” enables us to quickly create designs for different contexts. There are no longer any valid forms; every context and application requires its own type face. In larger contexts this is, with regards to rights, more cost-effective than purchasing several licences.

red dot online: With the “Type Generator” you have developed a programme that makes it possible to generate fonts by designing one’s own type fonts digitally. What was your inspiration for this development?

Remo Caminada & Ludovic Varone: In our training we were confronted with a great variety of different design techniques and methods – methodologies, in fact. On the one hand we had to examine, sketch, design and visualise pictographs and characters analogously and on the other hand to simplify them in order to create sign languages and reduce them in such a way that they qualified as designs. The advantages of both methods became clear in the process. It became perfectly obvious to combine these two techniques. The “Type Generator” is, of course, only the first step. The next step will be to create the Picture Generator.

red dot online: How does the “Type Generator” work?

Remo Caminada & Ludovic Varone: As already mentioned, the “Type Generator” is a digital design machine. It is fast, displays results instantly and approaches typography from a different angle. Furthermore, the “Type Generator” offers two essential advantages: there are the catalogue and the parameters. The catalogue stands for the form variations (semantics) and the parameters refer to the functional level (syntax).

red dot online: What advantages does working with the “Type Generator” offer?

Remo Caminada & Ludovic Varone: You can very quickly design fonts digitally as well as create digital designs involving fonts. With the Generator I can develop new forms for new contexts and thus create new narrative forms. I can generate many more than 100 fonts in one hour; forms, which have not existed before as such.

red dot online: Is there a special project which you would like to – maybe even together – implement one day?

Remo Caminada & Ludovic Varone: To destroy topography completely: to develop new communication platforms on the basis of universally understandable images, in order to take a short cut and bypass the alphanumeric code. By doing this our generator concept would offer completely new possibilities.

The new characters do not have to be committed to memory first, but can be recognised and used instantly, similar to the pictographs of the old Asian pictorial code (e.g. in old Chinese a hand and a fish mean “to catch fish”). Any child can understand a hand and a fish. Why do I need to use eleven characters (to catch fish) which I have to commit to memory first and which then only work in one language?