Typographic Gravity Racers

Full-Day Workshop
Time: 9:30–5:30 pm | 09:30–17:30 Brisbane local time
Length: 6 hours (plus midday break for lunch on your own)
Cost: $100

Location: QCAD South Bank Campus
Check-in 15 minutes before start time

Relatively speaking, the tools used to craft, produce, and publish typographic forms have never been more accessible nor more able. Computation has fused with form-making as variable and color font formats stabilize.

We find ourselves in a new era of meaning-making through text-based communication; in the midst of a typographic tidal wave.

The truth is, there is a lot of expression in font files and formats nowadays; the challenge is in getting the possibilities out. This workshop uses the metaphor of building ‘typographic gravity racers’ as a way for participants to learn how to make color variable fonts. By ‘opening the hood’ of variable and color font formats, we will explore how the technical production of these formats can be used in generative ways.

Designed for educators, students, professionals, and curious on-lookers alike, participants will create static, variable, and then color variable fonts in Glyphs 3… which will pick up speed as the forms are propelled by the gravity of what the tools afford.

Participants can expect a crash-course intro to variable and color font production. Workshop discussions and feedback sessions will center how prosody, meaning-making, and kinetic/generative potential can be leveraged inside of these processes.

How might these emerging font formats be used as sites-of-significance for expression, recreation, and experience? Please bring a laptop and a spirit of curiosity. Workshop materials and cheesy car puns/metaphors will be provided.

Attendees should bring:

• Laptop with Glyphs 3 (demo version is OK).
• Mouse (optional, if you wish).
• Pencil/sketchbook (for notes, if you wish).