While our book »Generative Gestaltung« was being presented at our publisher’s stand (the Hermann Schmidt Verlag) during the book fair in Frankfurt last October, Jürgen Siebert invited us to talk at the Typo Berlin. We were honored take on this exciting experience. The three day conference that FontShop has now hosted for the 15th time, began on the 20th of May 2010. This year’s theme was »passion«, and what theme could have fit us better? It has been two and a half years that we (Hartmut Bohnacker, Benedikt Groß, Julia Laub and Claudius Lazzeroni) have now passionately devoted ourselves to »Generative Gestaltung« in order to complete and publish it. It was the same passion with which we prepared our speech, that we have been presenting at design schools throughout Germany as well as at the Typo 2010.

Aside from all the interesting happenings that await a speaker at the Typo, our special experience was to stand on such a big stage in front of a large and competent crowd.

After the speaker prior to us – Erik Spikermann – kept us tense by generously exceeding his time limit, we finally got to hold our speech on generative design. Once we finished we still got to answer questions from the crowd under moderation from Alessio Leonardi together with our co-author Benedikt Groß.

Since we were lucky to have our speech on the first day, we were able to enjoy the rest of the three day event including the dinners, the Typo-Party and interesting discussions. We got compliments as well as useful tips and were delighted to give a few interviews.

One of our favorite speeches was from Joachim Sauter, the boss of Art+Com. Although we knew most projects from their website, it was still fascinating to see details from behind the scenes. He presented work from his agency as well as projects from his students at the UdK Berlin (the project called »Image Fulgurator« from Julius von Bismarck was an absolute highlight).

An other engaging speech was from Ralf Hermann, the editor of a new magazine called TypoJournal. His presentation was about the font he had developed for the German Autobahn signs. In a plausible and detailed way he described its development as well as findings from his research on readability.

What I was able to extract from David Carson’s controversial discussed presentation was that you can do what ever you feel like, once you have become famous enough. Let’s see when we finally make it there ;-)

see more images