The Habitat of a Typeface Today

Sync by
Emre Kızıldelioğlu

After all kinds of screens have come between us, human’s urge and fetish to transfer experiences from the physical world to an online world never stopped and continued in parallel with the development of technology and the internet. The accelerated dumping data today makes the notion that online world and offline world, cyber space and physical space, are separate things more and more meaningless. So we only become aware of the technical nature of our world under the condition of an invention or a „breakdown“. The illusion that we live in a natural world collapses as soon as we encounter a new invention or when something familiar to us is gone, broken or corrupted.
Sync is a formal investigation inspired on the one hand by fonts from early role-playing computer games and on the other hand by digitised fonts based on a calligraphic model.
The combination of elements of both is an attempt to visualise this strange in-between state and the uncanny feeling of not belonging to both worlds.

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.