Typography as an explorative practice between traditional design and the programming world

You’re a Portuguese designer who studied in Switzerland and now work in the United States. How has moving across these different environments shaped your path as a designer, and what do you consider the strongest influences on your practice? More broadly, how important do you think it is for a designer to study or work abroad — to experience different cultures and approaches to design thinking?

I would agree that, if one has the possibility, one should travel and experience as many environments and contexts as possible. Design is a field that is impacted and influenced by who/what/how we are as humans, so it definitely plays a big role on the way one thinks and makes. You learn so much by living in places that speak a language that you don’t fully understand, or that have daily routines completely different from the ones you grew up with.

At this point, there is so much information available digitally and online, that one might think physical travel and relocation are less necessary, and that you can experience these different perspectives remotely. But I'd argue the opposite. Having access to all that information makes the physical experience of actually being somewhere even more valuable.

I was very privileged to have had the opportunity of living in multiple places, and am still eager to explore new ones as life moves forward. I wish everyone had these kinds of opportunities, as they bring you perspective towards different cultures and make you more accepting of other ideas and experiences.

What strikes me now, working in design education, is how these cross-cultural experiences make you a better translator between different ways of thinking and making. Students and colleagues come from all kinds of backgrounds, and being able to recognize and validate multiple approaches, rather than insisting there's only one correct way to do things, creates a more accessible learning environment.

Your personal project A2Z has just been exhibited in Chicago, accompanied by a publication. Could you tell us more about it — what it’s about, when it began, how it has evolved, and what’s next for the project?

A2Z started a couple of years ago at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I began exploring with students the possibilities of designing letterforms using the LEGO® brick system. After spending a couple of semesters discussing and building modular letterforms, I thought it would be a great idea to expand this project and share this methodology with people outside of UIC. I looked for funding, and was thankful to have been granted the UIC Award for Creative Activity, which allowed me to transform this classroom assignment into an international collective project.

I’ve invited 36 designers from around the world to collectively design an alphanumeric alphabet, where each would contribute with their own letterforms following just a few constraints—three layers, five colors, and only official LEGO® brick shapes. No additional restrictions, no guidance, no feedback. I wanted to see what would happen when you give designers a specific set of rules and let them interpret them freely.

I teamed up with Amira Hegazy, a letterpress printer and designer based in Chicago, to bring these letterforms to life through printing—using a Vandercook Universal One proofing press that we have available at the UIC Print Lab. The alphabet became a massive undertaking—we used over 8,000 LEGO® bricks, ran 11,000+ sheets of paper through more than 27,000 passes on the press operated by hand. It was truly a labor of love that wouldn't have been possible without the help of many colleagues, students, and friends.

The exhibition at the Design Museum of Chicago showcases the entire project—student work, my personal experiments, the final alphabet prints, and the accompanying publication that documents the behind-the-scenes of how we made this alphabet come to life. This project is open-source in spirit, one can find all the information and research online, available and free. I am excited to see where others take it and how they might use this methodology in their own work and practice.

As a typography teacher in the U.S. with a Swiss design education, how have you adapted your teaching to your American students — who come from a very different context — beyond the existing connection between the Basel School of Design and University of Illinois Chicago?

Alongside being a teacher, I am a student as well. And as a student, if you want to learn and succeed, you need to be open to a couple of things. The first one is failure—knowing and accepting that you will make mistakes, and just try to make sure you learn from them. The second one is to embrace uncertainty—being ok with not knowing where the work will lead you, or what opportunities will come up along the way. Lastly, is the understanding that design is elastic—it’s not a constant and/or steady process. That things change quickly, and you need to be able to adapt to different situations and contexts. That flexibility and willingness to adjust your ways of doing things still proves to be a helpful guide to me when teaching in different contexts.

I also think that the role of the teacher should not come from a position of authority. So I try to share as much of my thinking process with students, making them understand where my assignments come from and what I expect them to do. In a way, I am just creating the space and imposing conditions (deadlines, methods, tools) that allow students to learn.

Today, technology continues to evolve rapidly — both through new tools and the improvement of existing ones. In this context, how do you think design education can remain relevant? Should we continue emphasizing foundational subjects such as basic design and typography, or should education focus more on technological tools and allow future generations to explore and define their own paths?

There are a couple of levels within design education, and those different levels should address the different aspects of our practice. From someone that is just starting, the basics are important—building up your technical skills, learning the discipline terminology and history, while developing your own methods and tools. Once you feel comfortable with those, then you start to engage with the field in a totally different way. You start to consider more complex and nuanced problems, and expand the way you can use typography and letterforms to communicate an idea. But foundational knowledge still proves to be key and there are important concepts there to be revisited every once in a while. They shouldn’t be the driving force of what we do, but a good grounding point when needed.

Design education should always encourage experimentation and engagement with the latest technology available. But it should do it from a responsible and critical viewpoint, studying the different pros and cons, and testing their limits—what it can or can’t do. Design and technology are so historically linked that ignoring these relationships and how they impact the way we make things doesn’t feel beneficial for anyone.

Your thesis, The Affordances of Scripting Typography, and your early research at the Basel School of Design explored how programming and computation had not yet significantly influenced the world of typography. How do you see that topic today? Has your perspective changed — do you think computation now plays a more active role in typography?

I still think that there’s plenty of opportunity and things to be explored in that field. When it comes to Type Design, I think the story is different—a lot of studios and type designers are incorporating new technologies and baking code into their typefaces, both for functional and/or experimental reasons. But if we are talking about Typography in its pure form, meaning both layout and typographic expression, then things are a little bit different. I think a lot has been done in interactive and moving formats—people like André Burnier and Vera van de Seyp are great examples of it—, but less when it comes to static or printed Typography. And this is partially due to the results of this interaction between the code and the visuals being less immediate. It takes time to print and produce something, unlike seeing an animation being rendered in a fraction of a second. And that feels somehow related to how one designs things today, where everything happens so quickly. So yes, computation definitely plays a more active role in typography at large, but there still are plenty of things to explore and do, mainly when it comes to printed matter.

How do you perceive the current state of design education?

Contrary to what a lot of people say, I feel that there’s a bigger need than ever to go study and be in school, for several different reasons. Design education has evolved, and in a lot of places it’s not about skill development anymore. We now focus on the development of critical thinking skills, encouraging the development of interpersonal networks and relationships, and an opportunity to develop and study areas of Design that the commercial world does not provide space for. I hope that people start looking at education not just as simple technical knowledge, but as a space to discuss the present, look at the past, and speculate about the future.

In your opinion, what is the role of emerging graphic designers?

What does emerging mean anyway? Someone can be emerging because they found something new or are exploring things that others haven’t been, independently of how long they have been in the field, or how old they are. I feel that we need to encourage young designers to develop a sense of care for the world (as a whole) and feel passionate about the field, wanting to contribute to it. How many great graphic designers do we know that were young when they produced their most impactful work? There’s something to be said about experience and maturity and its role when designing.

What advice would you offer to a young graphic designer entering the professional world today?

Be humble, curious, and ask questions. Be a part of as many things as you can, work hard, but never forget why you’re a designer in the first place.