Books Written and Edited
Type Navigator
Type Navigator
In collaboration with Twopoints.net, Barcelona
Twopoints.net is a cutting-edge design studio led by a couple: Spanish Lupi Asensio and German Martin Lorenz. Lupi and Martin have conceived, edited and designed several books for Berlin’s Gestalten publishers, as well as the I Love Type series for Hong Kong’s Victionary. In early 2011 they proposed Type Navigator to Gestalten, and the publisher proposed to add me to the team — at that point I had contributed texts to two of their books, so they kind of knew me as a type specialist.
At the time, Twopoint.net was based in Barcelona (they later moved to Hamburg), and I decided it would be more fun to work with them right there, rather than collaborating by email from Berlin. I spent about four weeks in Barcelona during early summer 2011, and hectic weeks they were. We were happy with the result: an independent collection of independent type foundries – including several foundries from Switzerland, the UK and elsewhere that had decided to go it alone and not seek distribution by large companies. In one of the introductory chapters I described the structure of the type world of the moment, including the various distribution channels that independent foundries used, or did not.
The book got printed in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair 2011. Meanwhile the world moved on. The day the book was presented in Berlin, I received an internal message that MyFonts had been acquired by Monotype. Which made my introduction outdated the moment it came out.