My name is Anthony and I like to collect typographic tshirts, I own about six and I’m always hovering over that little ‘add to cart’ button to add to my collection. I think it started when I bought a tshirt from a designer I met in Melbourne who devotes his professional life to protesting the use of Helvetica. Now I just like the nod of acknowledgment I get as I walk down the street and someone ‘gets’ what my tshirt is about. So I’m going to help you get in to this secret society by revealing some of my sources and featuring images of my favourite tshirts (many of which I own).

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Typotheque

Grandbüro

Fuck Helvetica

Super Superficial

ISO50

Neubau Berlin

Turn Nocturnal

2K by Gingham

Experimental Jetset spoke at the D&AD lecture I attended last night to a sold out theatre. They chose to present work they had done for French clients, simply as a theme for their talk. At first they seemed nervous speaking to such a large audience in a foreign language but it didn’t take long before they became more comfortable and enguaged the audience with their charisma and humour. It was interesting to listen to their process, they explained that they try to make design physical in their work, in that it references the real world through tearing or breaking an element, or the medium itself. I was particularly interested in their choice of sans-serif typefaces in 99% of their work, specifically what was their reason for it. Luckily this question was asked in the Q&A session at the end. Their response was that it wasn’t intentional, they’ve just always found a sans-serif better suited their projects. They thought serif faces were always associated with old fashioned typography, where you would chisel the forms in to stone or marble, while sans-serif was more current and reflective of the work they do.

My favourite piece of work they showed was the work pictured above, an invitation they did for a Wim Crouwel exhibition — a famous Dutch designer and typographer. They made reference to a calendar he had designed where the type was cut and on different layers of paper. They printed the letters of his name on to long sheets of paper at different sizes and hung the sheet from sliders on the ceiling of their studio. The letters increased in size so they could be placed behind one another but appear like they were the same size when viewed front-on. Then they got Crouwel to walk through the sheets of paper and had a photographer take photos —- a good example of referencing the real world through the design. They showed some other pieces of interesting work too like the branding for 104 - Cent Quatre and RMN, quite inspirational projects.