If You Really Love Me, You'll Choose a Better Font to Get Me Back

Sure, we might type something, and/or read a typed thing everyday; but how might we react when we suddenly notice what we are typing with? Or, with what we are being typed at? The talk by David Bennewith will try to illustrate this question via posts on a popular text-based social media service, and will explore the idea of fonts as a civil technology.

David Bennewith is an Amsterdam based graphic designer and design researcher, who works under the name of Colophon. His research-oriented and commissioned projects have a particular focus on type design and typography, such as authoring a monograph on New Zealand type designer Joseph Churchward in 2009. For this lecture he will talk about fonts as a civil technology.

Bio – David Bennewith (Takapuna NZ, 1977) recent design work includes the visual identity and catalogue design for Cinema Olanda, the Dutch entry to the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and for Secret Power, New Zealand’s entry to the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); the identity and graphic design for Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory in Utrecht (ongoing), and Walls That Teach: On the Architecture of Youth Centres, ed. Susanne Pietsch and Andreas Muller, co-designed with Sandra Kassenaar, which was nominated for the Best Dutch Book Designs award 2016. Since 2015, he is the head of the graphic design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.