Speaker Yanone

Yanone is a German-born multimedia artist, type designer, and self-taught software engineer. He has been coding since the age of 13, after his father, a mechanical engineer, introduced him to programming on his IBM 286 work computer. Yanone published simple but useless GUI tools for Windows in the late 1990s before turning to web design. He pursued a creative career and quit his first two semesters of I.T. to study visual communications at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and later at Type and Media at the KABK in The Hague, The Netherlands.

An internship took him to FontShop International in Berlin, where he was introduced to font production and Python programming. The internship cemented his position in the type world, and Andreas Frohloff, then head of the Tech Department at the independent foundry, later mentored Yanone’s thesis for his Weimar studies, a bilingual Arabic/Latin typeface for Jordan’s capital, Amman. The Amman connection resulted from a second internship during Yanone’s Weimar studies that took him to the Amman-based branding firm Syntax. The connection persisted, and, in 2014, Yanone returned to Amman to design FF DIN Arabic. This Arabic typeface was one he had secretly wished to develop, but he hadn’t told anyone about his desire until the project was offered to him.

Yanone met his wife in Jordan, and the couple lived together there for another five years. They recently returned to Germany to live near Yanone’s parents in Dresden.