Report
New skills and inspiring designs at Summer School 2024

From Dubai to Switzerland and Italy to Poland – new and familiar faces travelled to Breda. Among them were graphic designers, illustrators, typographers and other creatives. Well-humoured and full of curiosity, they started the masterclasses at De Uitvindfabriek on Tuesday 20 August. Our year’s theme Typical Type celebrates typography and its importance. Typefaces are essential not only for effective communication, but also for cultural understanding, inclusion and impact. Letters are the result of hundreds of years of discovery, discussion and exchange. 

Team Thursday, Vera van de Seyp and Kristyan Sarkis: three leading designers working with letters in extraordinary, unique ways. With an investigative, craft or future-oriented perspective, they give depth to the theme. 

 

Typographic book
We got to know the masters better during the Morning Talks, in which all three took the audience through their practice, methods and sources of inspiration. After that, it was up to the participants to show who they are. Familiar territory for graphic designer Jip by now, as this was his third year of Summer School. ‘It’s a nice combination of hard work and having fun. It’s great to work for three days both individually and together, and produce a nice result,’ he says. 

Jip is one of 15 participating makers at Team Thursday’s masterclass. During the workshop ‘A letter, a sentence, a book’, the group formed a dynamic editorial team, in which they made a typographic book together. Everyone brought a random book. Based on a sentence from that book, they all created a unique set of letters. By sparring over content, typography and layout, a publication with 272 awesome pages was born in just three days. 

 

Creative coding
Dozens of cut-outs, experiments and a metre-long wall of A4s immediately gave away where the Team Thursday participants were working. Also not to be missed was Vera van de Seyp‘s masterclass. During ‘Hyperloop’, participants – hidden behind their laptops and between tangled adapters – learned how to program a browser-based design tool themselves. This allows them to generate a (typo)graphic identity. For this particular assignment, everyone drew inspiration from their guilty-pleasure song.  

You can quickly get lost in the wonderful world of coding. But those unexpected paths often lead to surprising results, experienced graphic designer Davide: ‘Coding forces you to think in a different way. You have to constantly react to what happens. This masterclass also teaches me to be less hesitant in discovering new things.’ 

 

 

A lettering work
During ‘Arabic Lettering Workshop: Play’ – guided by Kristyan Sarkis – participants delved into the forms, heritage and workings of Arabic script. Key features and letterforms of this rich script were discussed. Participants played with these features, creating their own lettering.

Everyone started working with the same sentence from Abdel Halim Hafez’s song ‘Dehk We Leab’. In various ways, participants deconstructed the sentence and gave it their own twist. The final products are very different, but all fit the theme perfectly.

Mastery of the Arabic language wasn’t required. ‘Therefore, it’s important that the masterclass was slow enough for those who don’t know the language, and fast enough for those who are familiar with Arabic,’ Kristyan explains. Participant and graphic designer Kinda adds: ‘Eye-opening to see participants without Arabic knowledge working with a language they don’t understand. It shows that you don’t have to understand something in order to have respect and feeling for it.’ 

 

 

Wrapping up
On the final day, the tension and time pressure is felt. Finetuning, deliberating, maybe using a different font or colour after all? It all comes together in the final hours. And the result is impressive: all participants delivered an excellent piece of work. They learned from their masters, but also from each other. 

The entire group viewed and discussed the results together and Loes (Team Thursday), Vera and Kristyan praised all the beautiful things that had been made. With a dose of new inspiration, skills, friendships, wise lessons and a satisfied feeling, the fourth edition of Summer School came to an end. 

 

Summer School is supported by Keep An Eye Foundation and Gemeente Breda.
All photos were taken by Chantal van den Berg. View and download them here.