 I'm going to be the first height tester of this microphone system. I'm so grateful to be here. I'm so grateful for all of you to be here at Typecon. I should forward to the next slide. This is my home in South Minneapolis. The neighborhood is called Powderhorn. I live here with my two daughters, Beatrix and Colette, codenamed Coco, and my beautiful wife, Elizabeth Workman, who is a poet. And this is a typical spring scene in Minneapolis. We annually welcome the return of the sun when the color doesn't make it any less bleak, as you can see here. I designed the official unofficial flag for Powderhorn, ironically commissioned by a former MCAT student for Los Angeles Magazine. And this is that flag. Powderhorn is a really interesting community. It's a very open community, a very politically active community. We are part of the fifth district that voted for Ilhan Omar as our representative, which we're really proud of, especially in these times. This is the kind of message that you'll find in Powderhorn Park when you're walking around. It's a warm and welcoming greeting in these parts. So please feel warm and welcome when you come to South Minneapolis. The story of Fikcionis Tipugafika is the story of something that really shouldn't have happened. It's a project. It's a communication. It's a platform that existed in a place where maybe it shouldn't have existed. Much like this calendula plant, which is now in a second season of sprouting from the side of my garage, on the top left of the image you'll notice a snow blower, which is probably how the seed was put in this place. But it's been growing. It's not just any snow blower. It's the mighty Toro. Yes, power clear 175. This is the sound of winter in Minneapolis. It's a sound we all know and love. It's a sound often accompanied by other sounds. This is actually a 360-degree view of the project where the board I hung, which is 72 by 36 hung. And this is a beautiful spring day again. This was toward the end of the project. That was actually the afterward that you just saw here. Usually in these kinds of scenarios, you don't hear too much, maybe a snow blower or two. And or somewhere in the distance, especially when it's cold and it gets as cold as when Celsius and Fahrenheit converge and you'll hear a distance of, fuck, fucking fuck. That's also another sound of Minneapolis. Welcome, welcome. The project began on the side of my home. It began by invitation only. I worked with designers all over the world, both neo-fights, living legends. Felix Feffley was just there. Roussier Klapp from the Design Displacement Group. And local designers. It's a former student of mine, very near and dear to my heart. New trained tank, Tao, who's now in New York. And I'll try to give you a sense of the project and how it started and why it started and why it ended up in this, what I like to say, very unlikely place, or a little home in Powderhorn. The beginning of the project is actually rooted in this thing that I made some years ago, the original ficción estipográfica. This was an attempt of mine at the time when I was teaching at Penn State University to find a way to help students study both macro and microforms all at the same time, but also to try to develop and work with form. So this was the experimental set that I put up together. All the units are scaled down from A0 and these were all made with letro set, microgramma. And you can tell I was really excited about it that night. I decided to commemorate the moment in one sheet of fucking microgramma motherfucker. Which is the way you talk to yourself in your studio when you're stoned to the gills. I don't do drugs, don't do drugs, don't do drugs. That's a long time ago. These forms have become my friends and I still use them and I've been working with students. It's part of a larger set of introductory problems that I assign in a typography class at both introductory and advanced levels. And they have now traveled the world with me. And they never meant anything per se. They were just an expression of the time, et cetera. And they've been the subject of many workshops. This one, a beautiful result from one in Hangzhou, China. The other route of the project was a blog that I used to write called Geotipographica. And it's actually a blog that I started when I came to MCAT in 2007. It was initially for my students. I really wanted to bring the world to them. Both the world of graphic design, the world of typography, art, et cetera. After some time, I realized that it wasn't just my students that were reading, that it was actually gaining an audience. So this is some of the fun we used to have. You guys remember if you had a real version of Helvetica on your computer, the Mac OS version of Helvetica would sometime crash your computer, et cetera. But there were also other hidden secrets. So when you're writing a blog, you're speaking by yourself, nobody cares, nobody's listening, so you make up voices. In the dark gray trunks, Mac OS, Helvetica, bold. And in the light gray trunks, current defender of the faith, Helvetica Noia 75, 666 points. You'll notice on all of you will appreciate this. In the dark gray trunks, the oddly scalloped terminal that you see here, vertical terminal, that's a fucking serif, my friends. You know, that's a living treason. So those are the kinds of things that I used to write about, I know. My other favorite or one of my favorites that you might, and I'll zoom in here so you can see, and it's not what you think. I'm gonna tell you about this because this is part of the whole spirit of the Ficciones Tipo Grafica. You'll remember when the film Avatar came out and we were all in shock and dismay, et cetera. I actually have nothing against Papyrus. I love all fonts, great and small. I've often actually challenged my students that as a graphic designer, we should and we tend to love limitation and we should accept limitation and what if, it shouldn't happen to you, but what if the limitation was Papyrus? Well, one of my students, Dan St. Clair, took me up on this challenge years ago. He found the ugliest surface he possibly could, put Papyrus on that and threw in Comic Sans just as an extra little touch and it's actually gorgeous. The reason I was, and I know many people and you guys have lived through this time now too where Ryan Gosling was just on SNL recently, once again evoking this essence or this idea of us as these, you know, oh, Papyrus, we hate it, Comic Sans. The reason I was upset about it at the time was because in order to make the film Avatar, they spent millions and millions of dollars. They brought in the best and brightest people to invent entire technologies so that they could make this film. They hired brilliant linguists to create a language for the Navi and when it came time to create subtitles, I imagine, and I don't know if this is true, but I imagine the conversation went something like this where somebody came along, hey, hey James, how you doing? I'm sorry, Mr. Cameron. Mr. Cameron, we've got a problem. The Navi needs some subtitles. I got a solution. I know this guy down in New Zealand. He's a New Zealander. His name is Chris Sowersby. He runs this place called Klim Type Foundry. It's actually Milk Spelt Backwards. That's true. I don't know, sorry about it if you didn't know about that. It's Milk Spelt Backwards. It's great. He can knock this out. And if you don't like him, I know this other person. She's fantastic. Her name is Erin McLaughlin. She's Hindi Rini. That's her handle on Twitter. She'll do this. It'll be brilliant. And James Cameron probably said for a second and this I also don't know if it's true. He said, hold on. I don't know what about, you're talking about Milk Spelt Backwards, but I have a son. I don't know if he has a son. I have a daughter. I have a daughter. She has this thing on her computer and all the kids love it. And you know what I'm seeing in my mind? I'm seeing lunch boxes. I'm seeing t-shirts. I'm seeing fantasies. I'm seeing money. And I guarantee you the decision came down to something like that. And the opportunity and the failure of the opportunity to come to somebody like you sitting in the audience today to say we need you to invent a Roman character subtitle based for this imaginary language for probably nowhere near as much as they spent on the technology. And to me that was especially as an educator a really defining moment that we hadn't after all these years still come to the point where people would respect what we do and need us as much as we need them to understand what we do. This is a little message I wrote to myself a long time ago. You can tell because it's a CD envelope taking the world means sending the right message to everyone. And that was my intent with Fictiones Tipugafica. Here's some image of the board coming together. Here's an image of it being built. What I wanted to do with Fictiones is what I admire about the bebop musicians for example that they were literally turning their backs on an audience in order to play for themselves. They didn't care how they were gonna be received. And I wanted this project to be that kind of project. I wanted it to be a project for us. It was gonna be my emigre so to speak. And as I like to say, if Avatar is Exxon Mobile this project was Joy Division. This is it. The last slide was me hanging the first one. This is me in my motor head period hanging the 1,000th poster. On average, I actually measured this one time. This becomes muscle memory as you're putting these things together. I did over 350,000 brushstrokes of weed paste that I just made in the kitchen to put it up. This is the work of, I'll mispronounce his name, Benoit Baudouin who's a great friend and was actually the person who encouraged me at the beginning of the project to move it from, sorry about the blue underwear shot there, to move it from invitation only to accept invitations and accept submissions. I hung over 1,641 posters. Those are the official numbers. There were many, many more. I cut them all down by hand. I made all the weed paste and I put it up like this. So here's the mighty brush. Note to self, if you ever wanna start a project like this, have medical insurance so the occasional tetanus shot might be worthwhile. This is what happens, don't let everybody ever tell you that two-dimensional work isn't three-dimensional because of 40 below, toner starts to freeze and it shrinks just like it should. Here's what weed paste look five seconds after it goes on the brush when it's way too cold and it freezes. Here's what a frozen brush looks like when it's way too cold and it freezes and you can stand it on your hand. Here's what weed paste attracts. The sugar that I use, some people find that controversial to use sugar, but I use sugar and the insects love it. And this is, and yet I'm undentified, perhaps there's someone in here who knows what this is, but these little friends that I made over time came to love the project. At the beginning of the project, people mostly sent in single 24 by 36 inch posters. That was a really exciting time because I could curate and put unexpected combinations together here, so on the right you have the absolutely legendary Reza Abedini, brilliant Iranian designer. In the middle, a professor of printmaking in Istanbul, Turkey, Bir Sanak, and on the left, a complete hobby photographer, Andreas Kuhn from Germany. Most of the project developed like that until I actually opened it up for submissions and then people started going for more, let's say, of a full triptych type approach. And one that came in that really excited me very early on was from a young designer in London, Kiyotash Bigu, who you're probably familiar with in his brilliant designs. Often snowy scenes associated with this. There was a wide variety of subject matter that was covered. I allowed the word typographic or typographic expression to be defined very broadly. And I think that's actually one part of the thing that made this so popular amongst people all over the world and encouraged their submissions. The subject matter is very broad, as I say. This is a personal favorite of mine. A lot of the neighbors who started changing the way they migrated around Powderhorn, the way they went to work, the way they walked their dogs with stop-by, this one brought up a lot of interesting comments. We experimented on occasion with contemporary practice to add to these kinds of things as well. But for me, the interconnection that I had with people who would send in their submission and that I would often tell them, I don't know if this is gonna go up, I don't know when it's gonna go up, but I love your work and I'd love to talk with you more. This is a really special one, very near and dear to my heart, is a young man in Albania, Kristi Kunga, who wrote and this became one of the biggest things of the project that he was so grateful for this project because, oh man, here comes the frog again. It allowed him to fulfill his dream of becoming an artist and I was really happy to play a small part in that. Sorry, I'm a total sap and I'm completely jet laggy and over-emotional and I'm trying to really share my heart with you and, whoo, man, man, I wish this mic wasn't so good. The project, and this is another one that I'll just speak briefly about and I don't like to say too much about these because people shared their voices. This is from a young designer, Ilya Fox, who is in Israel and in this one, he really captured, I think, the emotion, the melancholy of this generation, where he says, for example, on the far right, I have things to say but I feel nothing can be taken serious so I make a joke about it. People shared their joy of typography, they shared their experimentation and, as I say, I think they often shared their true selves and this was a place where they could do it. There was no commercial gain. I never made any money off this. This is a completely fictitious image built entirely in pixels and that's, I think, the power of it. This one, especially near and dear to my heart, having grown up in Northern Germany, that's what you do with the Schaufenster when you're changing the display, et cetera, and you wipe soap over it. My own contributions to the project were invariably political in nature. Over time, I felt I had this stage. Over time, we've seen the most heinous things happening, especially here in our country right now. We see outright ethnic cleansing happening which I am against. In 2015, when the fascist started emerging, I hung this as a reminder and it's been torn down once again, we have witnessed murder and so the logical successor to the project is now called typographica politica and it's only me and I'm on occasion trying to celebrate the greatness and the small advances that we're making that will hopefully become lasting. And I'm trying to help people understand that Powderhorn is a place to do this, that you don't have to be afraid of each other. And here's for my friend Chris Sowersby who allowed people to use Maelstrom Sands. And many, much of this work is now, you know, it's because the daily outrageous in our society, this was the murder of Philando Castile nearby in St. Paul, are becoming so outrageous that it almost feels pithy every five minutes you could find something new to make something about. One of the things I'm most proud about about the project, and this is an image from Trinidad Tobago where a young man named Christon Chen called me one day and said, I have this place, it's called Alice Yard and I would like to do something similar to your project. Would that be okay with you? And I said, yes, please do that. And we use this image on my wall to help promote this project. It was also taken up by a young French group, Oripot, who's been really doing well. The project was really well received, it was covered by magazines and blogs, et cetera, around the world. It was a subject of an exhibition in France in La Havre by Jean-Michel Jéridin, very close friend of mine. And most, for me, especially my father's German and I grew up largely in Germany, the project actually became the subject of a book on the philosophy of design and even better than that, a German book on the philosophy of design. And for example here, seeing my name, the graphic designer Eric Brandt just makes me freak out. One of the best parts about the project was on occasion having to take it down to remove things and I actually developed a process with hot water to break down the weed paste just so. And I could create these sort of reverse decollages or reverse paintings, as I like to call them, and find new relationships in the work, unexpected relationships, things that weren't intended to happen. And this also became, I think, one of the more popular parts of the project. You can see here, for example, it's incredible what happens to weed paste. If you see over there on the left, that image is pink, but the original image, there's just a fine sliver that sometimes gets revealed and changes the object. So the project found it's very organic and logical end and I'm very proud of the fact that recently, Formus, and I normally say Das Buch, because of his giant side, was published by my friend Mark Gowing of Formus in Sydney, Australia. I will be here tomorrow and on Sunday as well, selling copies of the book that I'm happy to sign for you if you like. But I'm really proud of this book because together with Mark, I think we found a way with these overprints at one-to-one scale to allow you or any viewer to get a sense of the project as it was, as I had it in my hand. So over here, another brilliant young Iranian designer Iman Rad, next to a living legend, Ed Fela. I defy anyone to find their favorite spread in this book. I certainly can. I still can't believe it's real that it's in the world. I promised myself a long time ago that this would come to this, but given my business model of spending money and not having any money coming in, it became very clear that I would never reach this goal. So I'm endlessly grateful for Mark Gowing for taking this in his hands. This is Brayu Omado on the left. My name is Wendy, brilliant young French designers who are working together. So that is Das Buch, as I like to call it. It's a joke, it's a reference to Das Buch. I know, it never works. It's like the Joy Division reference. So the book itself has now found through several successive book launchings, a home. Last but not least, I want to share with you, there's the frog again. My favorite fiction is Tipo Graphica, which was done by my daughter, Beatrix. She knows that her mother's a poet and she came to me one day and she said, whoo, hey, do you want to see my poem? And I said, of course I do, Beatrix, what is it? She says, it's a poem about ages. So that's Beatrix and that's my story. Thank you from Powderhorn. A thousand thanks to all of you.