Speaker Torben Wilhelmsen

I started my typographic career as teenager back in the mid 60’s with tracing Leibniz Fraktur letters from my mother’s book about sign and poster typography. And experimented on some mean old style figures when I tried to treat Letraset’s Cooper Black numerals as if there were ‘normal’. I chose though to skip these pre-9o’s trashy attempts, but when Henrik a quarter century later founded the danish ‘Cooper Black Klubben’, I kinda accepted my destiny to become a font nerd. This was my true inner form-and with special inter­est in movable type.
Meanwhile I discarded seven years on the university and a save future, and taught myself as illustrator and graphic designer. In my studio ‘Den Biå Trompet’ I designed magazines and posters and occasionally handdrawn dis­play fonts for a decade be­fore the Macintosh saved my time and the next artistic quantum leap-and lifted my wallet for a year income.
Btw, my 10 and 16 years old daughters named the cat Frida. And their mother, who rules in the garden, named our second cat Soffy.