 Thank you for having me. I figure that the best way to start this presentation is both with a warning and an apology. So first the apology. Heavy Metal is a very big thing. It spans for over four decades. It grew into a vast number of subgenres, and there are thousands and thousands of bands that have made a very important contribution to the scene. Because of time constraints, I cannot show everything there is. So if you're a fan, and you don't see your favorite band or your favorite genre or your favorite album within this presentation, I am truly sorry. So metalheads, please don't kill me. Now the warning. Because I'll be speaking about heavy metal, some images will be graphic in nature. Even when I try to steer away from the most controversial ones, some examples are needed in order to put things into context. So if you're offended by anything that you see within this presentation, I am truly sorry. Conservative people, please don't kill me. I also thought that the best way to start was just like, hell, start with a bang. And I'm going to show you the most shocking and horrifying image that I have within the presentation. So you've been warned. Because, well, that is me. I was 17 years old. I truly believed I was born to be a rock star. And I was obsessed with heavy metal. Not only with the music itself, but also with the letterwork that appeared in many of my favorite albums. I remember thinking that those were the coolest looking letters I've ever seen in my life. And to a certain degree, I still think so. Don't get me wrong, I know that most of them are terrible. But yet, they work perfectly fine for what they're meant to do. And they have done so since the very beginning. The foundations for what would eventually become heavy metal, both in terms of sound and graphic experimentation, were laid during the psychedelic movement of the 60s. Throughout this decade, a number of historic events, as well as the heavy use of drugs consumed in the pursuit of enlightenment, caused a series of cultural, social, and artistic changes. National service was abolished. A man walked on the moon. The pill gave sexual liberation to women. And rather than go to college to learn how to be a mechanic or carpenter, things had a new institution known as the art college. All of this had dramatic effects on society. Suddenly, anything was possible. Music became louder and rougher than ever before. And the album covers and promotional materials of many popular bands of that era work as a clear reflection of this paradigm shift. Long gone are the pictures of well-dressed, well-behaved boys accompanied by playful but quite legible typography. Instead, they're replaced by artistic renditions with bright colors and hard to read, but very expressive letterwork, which sought to capture the essence of the music itself. This is a period of great visual experimentation with letters that twist and turn and combine with one another. It seems to be that the main objective is for the user not to read the message, but to feel it. By the end of the decade, a new generation of musicians inspired by their psychedelic predecessors and hardened by a rough upbringing and an impoverished environment began to explore darker sounds and themes. Bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Judas Priest defined the characteristics that would spawn a whole cultural phenomenon. Heavily distorted guitars, a powerful voice, mysterious lyrics, a bit of S&M, and a whole lot of performance art, as well as a pre-election for the occult, all mixed together within the dark cauldron of music history to keep both too heavy metal. That was a very fancy sentence, and it took me forever to write it. It could have been a scene from Tolkien, reminiscent of Saruman's Isengard. You could hear the sound of the hammer on anvil. You could taste and smell the metal working factories that helped to intensify the grimness and angry resentment felt by many in the working class industrial West Midlands. This is also a period of great graphical ingenuity, with many traits from the psychedelic era being repeated. As the genre consolidates itself, letter work stops changing from album to album, and the use of a defined logotype becomes a common practice. Additionally, because of its relationship with medieval Europe and with more modern war-like conflicts, many metalheads are obsessed with World War II, metal artists develop a long-lasting fascination with teutonic culture, specifically with the appropriation of Gothic calligraphic models and with the gratuitous use of the umlaut, just because, according to them, it looks really cool. The late 70s and early 80s constitute a great period of production for heavy metal. With the implosion of punk, aspiring musicians no longer felt the need to spend years developing their craft and building a fandom in order to convince a record label into signing them. Instead, anyone could pick up a guitar or a microphone, record whatever the hell came out, and release it to the world. Armed with independent outlooks, total self-belief, and unbridled enthusiasm, this fresh new breed of UK rock band began to break through using the same route to stardom as the punks. To hell with the big labels who don't understand us, let's make our own records and sell them off our own backs. And if that doesn't work, we'll use the back of lorries instead. Graphically speaking, logotypes seek to appear as tough and as powerful as possible. So sharp edges and roughened contours become prevail, they start to prevail. Additionally, the album covers become the perfect medium to both inform and shock the buyer. They seem to scream, you know exactly what you're paying for. And they also work perfectly to fulfill the power fantasy of the male-dominated music genre. There's also this very interesting phenomenon that occurs with the morphing of letter works into graphical representations of the previously mentioned themes with axes and swords and dragons and demon tales becoming popular motives. The eighties brought a whole lot of access to the whole world. And LA Sunset Street became the perfect breeding ground for all of its decadence. This is awesome, isn't it? Yeah. Anyway, heavy metal bands went through musical and visual transformation. They started to play pop-infused melodies. And they started to look more outlandish and flamboyant than ever before. Additionally, with the rise of MTV, heavy metal stopped being an underground phenomenon. And for the first time in its history, it became part of the mainstream. Band members Don Leather and Spandex raided their girlfriends' closets, teased their hair out, and shell-acted with aquanet, then cranked out ranch anthems about sex and rebelliousness, and sensitive fallots about swelling love and broken hearts. Thanks to this newly established popularity, there's an increase in the supply of heavy metal bands. As a result, competitions got stiff. And appearances gained an unprecedented importance. The majority of album covers from this genre are incredibly well-executed pieces of hard work, displaying flashy characters and flashy images, which perfectly encompass and project the 80s party lifestyle. Some of them even pushed the sexual objectification of women to just awful, awful extremes. Letter-wise, this is a very eclectic period of time, with many popular trends co-existing all together, from the hard-looking extensile and graffiti letter work from the streets to the well-crafted and very well done Neon Sign-inspired lettering. Fresh metal was the direct and opposite reaction to glam metal. They rejected the media-friendly convention of its contemporary, and instead chose to be as fast and as violent as possible. Thrashing bands weren't looking for a place to party. They were looking for a fight. And if they didn't find one, they made one. It is also, for some weird reason, one of the most well-known and well-established metal genres of all time. And it managed to produce some of the most successful bands, not only within metal, but within music in general. Thrashing metal was born out of a need for speed and a visceral outlet for rage. But though its low art and low concept nature was organic, thrash grew from its DUI roots and became a silver charge as its temple. As the subgenre gathered momentum, it garnered attention from the major labels and ignited a passion in fans that eventually earned thrash a place as one of the most crucial movements in heavy metal history. The majority of logotypes from thrash bands looked like they could leave a nasty cut if you dare to touch them. Sharp edges, razor sharp edges, as well as straight strokes are used in order to convey the generous speed and violence. There's also a lot of graphical experimentation with morphing of letters. And I find these not only incredibly cool, but also educational. If you're trying to learn about the anatomy of type, that is literally a spine, which is awesome. Throughout this period of time, and specifically within this genre, there's a predilection for symmetry, one which will eventually find its place and permeate into subsequent genres and related genres as well. If thrash metal took things into the extreme and was heavy metal with asteroids, that metal was heavy metal on, I don't know, on herring. Human growth homework. There you go, human growth homework. Focusing mainly on the macabre and dwelling into things like occultism, paganism, horror. Its lyrical content can easily be taken from a slasher film, depicting bloody acts of violence and mutilation and rape. More savage than thrash and more bestial than black, death metal would become heavy metals on kuth cousin. The genre would ransack the existing extremities of thrash and classic metal and make it slower, deeper, and more decrepit. It was the music of horror and fear. Graphically speaking, the album covers of death metal. Try to convey the macabre point of view of the genre, with the letters being presented either as instruments of torture or as the rotting remains of whatever the hell came out after using the instruments of torture. Horror motives are a common thing, as well as the overordnamentation and over-deformation of the letters. And funny enough, pre-medieval and medieval models, like from Anest, Unshow, Blackletter, and many more, are used once again to convey the specific ideologies of these specific subgenres. The new millennium didn't bring the end of the world. Instead, it brought one of the most divisive genres within music history, new metal. By getting rid of the guitar solos and combining metal melodies with hip-hop, rap, funk, and grunge and many others, heavy metal managed somehow to appeal to a wide range of teenagers, becoming one of the most economically prolific endeavors of the 21st century, even when many music histories and metalheads like these regard the genre and don't even consider it as metal. The repetitive downturned grunge riffs may be an easy identifier of the genre, but they were far from challenging musically. Easy to replicate at home, this was metal at its base level, musically anyway. Once again, gothically graphic models are embraced, specifically Blackletter, to portray the characteristics of this subculture. Additionally, hip-hop and rap culture heavily influenced the graphic content of new metal. This is a very, very eclective and creative period of time. Don't get me wrong. With kind of a weird post-modern interpretation of how letters work and how letters are portrayed with these kind of ornamented experiments and deconstruction of letters and repetition of letters and so many other things, which I find really, really interesting, but I have to admit I don't like new metal that much. So I rather move on to certain things that I find much more interesting and fun, like black metal. Black metal dared to look into the abyss and the abyss looked back. In spite of being arguably the most prolific heavy metal genre of them all, it has managed to stay as an underground phenomenon. Its separation from mainstream culture stems from the extreme ideologies that are commonly associated with it. Perhaps the most misunderstood, yet also the most creative area of the whole metal genre are form of music that has become billified and feared because of the almost omnipotent violence with which it has long been associated. Yet through the music and also the art that has surrounded it, black metal has long been proven as a creative force, one inevitably propelled by dark forces, but also inspired by much that's the very essence of nature and of Mother Earth. This is awesome. The expressive potential of heavy metal type reaches within black metal, its senate. Letters are twisted, bent, deformed, grow branches around more and more distorted the heavier the music it gets. Taking inspiration from a wider rate of aesthetic influences from the eerie atmosphere of a desolated forest to the violent constraints of an art deco metal gate, black metal logotypes couldn't care less about legibility. And yet I can only describe them as hauntingly beautiful. Once again, it seems that the main objective is not for the user to read the message, but to feel it. Heavy metal within black metal has come full circle. Now, to end this talk, some thoughts and conclusions. Because of the ubiquitous nature of the written language, it has been forced to be very flexible. As a result, and because of the ever-changing communication needs of human culture, it has been adapted to a wider rate of scenarios from the conventional paragraphs of most books with letter forms that have been designed and typeset very carefully for continuous reading to the lower types of black metal bands which just set to hell with legibility. The art of heavy metal, and I would add heavy metal type, much like any other art form, depicts the many cultural aspects and changes we have gone through in our society, fashion, politics, social values, racial views, lifestyles, it's all there. Reflecting back to us our cultural development through the marvelous world of album artwork. Now, I have a confession to make. Even when I kind of, I'm fascinated by these two extremes, I think I would like something in the middle. I would like to have kind of a slider or somewhat a way to control it so that if I have a metal band and my music evolved and got suffered throughout time, I can actually kind of dial it down a little bit. And that would be cool, wasn't it? Or even what if it instantly reacts to the kind of music that I'm playing? So if I have a power ballad, it's kind of more teen, and if I have a strong and hard rocking song, it goes crazy. Well, we kind of can. And I'm showing you this because not only I find it fun, but because even when there are clear advantages of the use of the variable font format, specifically within digital environments, most of what Typhus designers and designers are like will do with it is uncharted territory. And I find that incredibly exciting. So I'm just inviting everyone to embrace, not only this technology, but to embrace the extreme renditions of a written language to get lost within the forbidden forest. Because within it, there's beauty. This is an invitation to listen to a little heavy metal. Thank you so much.