April 14th, 2008
Nofont getting back to the future.

So many projects and ideas is lying on the harddrive about to wake up and come alive. The time is now really divided between clients and self fund projects. And I truly love it.

First up is a project that I’ve been running with Jaan Orvet over at Sharpenr.net. The project will hopefully be big but whatever happends it will be fantastic. It has forced me, and I guess Jaan to, to review almost every view and value we have on running our own businesses. The project will be released later and I’m really looking forward to it.

An alternative take on typography.

Second coming is my passion above all; typography. The earlier versions of Nofont.com had a clerer focus on typography but it was always just for fun, just something I did on the weekends and the evenings. Earlier I failed to bring it to the level that it really deserved. The third edition of the site really took of, lots of press coverage, lots of feedback and tons of visitors, but I failed to maintain it. Today I regret that hugely, I brings tears to my eyes that I neglected it … but there was so much other things that I preferred to do instead, I met my future wife Malin, we got two kids (and now a third coming), we started the kids store and the clothing lable. So it would not have time to keep Nofont going and to be honest I don’t think that I would have come to this point with the business if it hadn’t been for the above things.

This time thypography are on a totally different scale, the typography of the 4th edition of Nofont will be the best ever. I have found that feeling I had almost 10 years ago, everything feels fresh, everything has a value and every part of the business has it’s clear purpose.

The biggest difference is that today tools for everything you want to do is in reach. 10 years ago everything had huge prize or had to be self developed; payment solutions, forums, book publishing, distribution of merchandise, decent hosting, CMS and more.

Back to the future. The “Typography” section will contain;

• Typography - tips and trix for the daily production/typography.
• Alternative typography - experiments with typography, letterforms and communication. Those was the backbone of the third edition and will be reborn this fall. There will be new ideas and experiments. The old ones will be published as a book.
• Charachters - for quite sometime I have been collecting letters from old signs, 3 dimentional physical steel letters. They will be put on display and available for sale (and a lot of them are already sold).
• Scripts/tools - I wouldn’t call them plugins or apps but they are small scripts made for, firstly, InDesign and they take care of the daily repeated monotone typographic work you have to do when you are working with books and magasines. The scripts will be on sale and downloadable from the site.

Last (and maybe least) up of the coming things is the portfolio. Generally I’m not that fond of portfolios. Simply cos they are not reflecting the truth about you as a designer, they are often polished up and commercial stuff might be mixed up with non commercial or promotional projects. Ideas that origins from someone else is mixed up with ideas that the designer never have been able to sell. So to reflect a designers daily delivery I don’t trust portfolios at all. Used in a way of saying what the designer likes to work with, fine, I can buy that.

For the last five years I have only taken jobs on recommendation, mostly cos I have worked with a lot of people and the network has grown out of that. But also cos I get a natural filter, the first selection is made by people that know me and I have a personal connection to/worked with earlier. They know if a project fits me or not and they make the first selection unconsciously to my advance.

Now that I focus more and more on nofont.com I won’t have that personal connection with everyone that comes by so I must put the portfolio out there. I’m not that happy about it but as a antithesis I have published the Annual Design Reports so that people can se everything I have ever done and form their opinions from there.

So Nofont of 2008 has a lot of passion coming. Keep it up Andreas, you are doing good!

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