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Ian Party

Awarded

Ian Party

Font 'BPcelsian' (formerly 'Phedan'), (diploma work)

Graphic Design

Jury report

Curves with corners
Why de­sign type­faces by hand in this day and age? The ty­pog­ra­pher Ian Party, who cre­ated the new 'BPcel­sian' type­face, pro­vides an an­swer to this ques­tion. De­spite all-em­brac­ing com­put­er­i­za­tion, he starts his de­sign by hand a first, and then dig­i­tal­izes it in a sec­ond step. Ian Party, who trained in Lau­sanne, de­con­structs be­fore he re­con­structs. In order to de­velop 'BPcel­sian', Party cut up his 'start­ing ma­te­r­ial', a sten­cil-like type­face, into its com­po­nent parts. Here he takes ad­van­tage of the fact that cal­li­graphic type­faces can be bro­ken down into small el­e­ments, re­flect­ing the line fol­lowed by hand and pen. The el­e­ments he iso­lated in this way then had to be sim­pli­fied and re­assem­bled. When de­vel­op­ing 'BPcel­sian', this meant for ex­am­ple that the upper curved part of the let­ter 'b' was one of the small­est of these el­e­ments. The chal­lenge for the de­signer now lay in de­sign­ing a type­face that would gen­er­ate the whole roman al­pha­bet with the small­est pos­si­ble num­ber of these com­po­nents.
This highly in­di­vid­ual con­cept means that tran­si­tions be­tween the small­est ty­po­graph­i­cal units do re­main clearly vis­i­ble in the 'BPcel­sian' type­face. Rounded parts, for ex­am­ple, look strangely an­gu­lar, while in the let­ter 'a', for ex­am­ple, the lower part of the curved sec­tion and the ver­ti­cal stroke are not con­nected, which is again rem­i­nis­cent of let­ter­ing writ­ten witha quill pen. But the charm of Party's in­vented type lies pre­cisely in this ex­ag­ger­a­tion of the hand-writ­ten qual­ity-one is al­most tempted to say this car­i­ca­ture of that qual­ity. What could be seen as dis­turb­ing at first glance – a cer­tain clum­si­ness –, gives the new type­face its very spe­cial, un­mis­tak­able char­ac­ter, ev­i­dence of its de­signer's sub­tlety and in­ven­tive spirit.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Ian Party
Born in
1977
Education
Designer HES en communication visuelle, spécialisation design graphique

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