Celebrating five years of font-making, Colophon Foundry marks its birthday with a show at KK Outlet and a typically ingenious concept...
It can sometimes be hard to believe that Colophon Foundry have only been around for half a decade, such is their elevated position within the typographic landscape. Works such as Aperçu are now so prevalent that you could accuse them of being victims of their own success — that is, if there was any sense of fatigue associated with their repeated viewing; that there is not is the ultimate triumph in type-craft.
The unambiguously titled FIVE YEARS, hosted at Hoxton’s KK Outlet, is a chance to celebrate the foundry’s short but prolific history thus far. The show takes a typically ingenious conceit, imagining twenty-six fictional existences for twenty-six nonfictional typefaces. The fonts represented include Aperçu, Archive, Article, Castledown, Central Avenue, Fortescue, Hotshoe, La Fabrique, LAW, Leroy, Lisbon, Lydia, Monosten, Montefiore, Pantograph, PDU, Peggs, Perfin, Poynings, Raisonné, Reader, Relative, Transcript, Unify, Value, and one created especially for the exhibition, Burgess. These are captured for one moment in a projected version of their lives.
According to Colophon, the exhibition “highlights the role of the type designer as a complicit enabler, passive collaborator, and disembodied author of others' designs and intentions.”
Here’s to the next five years.
FIVE YEARS
KK Outlet
4 April – 26 April 2014