December 2013, Typeradio held a two day workshop in cooperation with Indra Kupferschmid and 10 students of the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste (HBK Saar) in Saarbrücken, Germany. Each student was assigned a typeface, designed by a Dutch designer, along with the assignment: ‘translate the typeface into a one minute sound piece’.
The resulting 10 sound pieces were the starting point of another workshop, in collaboration with Jan Willem Stas and the students of the Type]Media 2014 typography master coarse in The Hague, The Netherlands. Each T]M student was handed an (anonymously labelled) sound piece and their challenge was to ‘create a typeface concept inspired by the sound’. The results were quite surprising!

1) Original typeface: Brokken by Donald Beekman

2) Sound piece by Tumaj Talimy

3) Chinese whispered typeface by Sláva Jevčinová

Sláva: “Who else got to watch cartoons for research? Lucky ME!

The first seconds of Tumaj’s sound reminded me of this splendid genre. It inspired me to design a very simple cartoon typeface with handwriting flavour and specific features that resemble cartoon characters (big counters=big heads, thin weight=tiny body, long thin serifs=long feet). Nevertheless, The second part is a bit disruptive and carries a negative impression with it. The sound interprets a dwarf’s hard work of digging in the mines, therefore I decided to include certain OpenType features. Despite the disturbing part, the main goal was preserving playfulness for the project. That’s all Folks!”