The Habitat of a Typeface Today

Hypersonic by
Michele Sablone

As a fully automated high-tech, sleek-looking spaceship takes you on board on a space journey, you start to feel an unsettling sense of solitude and isolation, with only the on-board’s computer’s speech synthesiser soft and comforting voice to keep you company and tell you about themselves, while travelling at hypersonic speed into the deep dark and cold outer space. Picture this as the concept of Hypersonic, a liberally post-ironic take on the turn-of-the-century’s tech-optimistic zeitgeist and aesthetic, to envision today’s techno-utopians’ accelerationist ideas for society moving into the future – at hypersonic speed.

Since the first personal computer came into this world in the 1980s, there have already been three generations of the World Wide Web. Web standards have continuously evolved, and graphical user interfaces surround us everywhere on various devices. Most human computer interactions and the resulting interfaces are not designed with a cultural mission in mind, but defined by the five largest, most dominant, and most prestigious companies in the information technology industry. By studying visual and structural constraints that we are facing through predefined interaction surfaces, and the standards, norms, influences and styles that have been established, each student designed a typeface and its habitat on this website.

Participating students

Niklas Weisenbach ↘ HMT John Weber ↘ Anomalie Juhee Han ↘ White Forest Michele Sablone ↘ Hypersonic Emre Kızıldelioğlu ↘ Sync Moritz Schneider ↘ What Do You Recognize? Joel Luca Sequeira Ferreira ↘ Modern Balance Sophie Eckhardt ↘ Four Tones Saara Kuum ↘ Mildewy Tizian Repp ↘ Wetlands Felix Harr ↘ Reditus

This website was programmed by Simon Knebl.

The Habitat of a Typeface Today was a seminar at the Communication Department of Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in the summer semester of 2022 supervised by Katharina Köhler.