Bruno Maag Lecture

"Typography Technician"
We've had a talk from the Swiss Typographer Bruno Maag, who went extensively into his personal career and his processes he undertakes when producing typography for a client. He is well known for his variety of client pieces and has successfully set up his own business Dalton Maag which works with clients worldwide. Example clients of his he gave within his lecture, but some examples include:  Lush cosmetics, Amazon, Puma, Intel, Oxfam, Samsung, BMW, BT and Burberry.

Example work for LUSH Cosmetics company.

As someone who describes himself as a typography technician, Maag says he favours black and white elements rather than the colourful implications of other designs such as graphic and motion design. He implied that he is "not an artist, I am a designer" developing his thoughts that he designs for the money, for the client, and for the portfolio overall.

Sketchbook work Dalton Maag for Rio 2016

He spoke about the transition between physically producing typefaces for aspects such as New York Newspapers, to producing digital aspects for online merchandise as well as using digital formats to print onto products. He joked about the fact that his training was very different from the training that he gives his interns and new colleagues today, as when he started out in the business as working for Monotype in England, he had to draw a precise line all week till it was perfect, and if the measurements were off by 1mm physically, he'd have to try again for a new week, slowly and strictly training their precision. He described that such precision CAN be taught, and says that now for his own training scheme within his business of Dalton Maag, he trains his employees with physical as well as digital elements, to strictly inform them of the precision needed. They begin with calligraphy, which then evolves to painting typography and restricting the size of such font to 10pt to ensure the trainees are able to produce a font that will successfully be shrunk down or enlarged and still convey the same language and understanding to the reader.

Final Rio Olympics 2016 Typeface by Dalton Maag

He analysed the fact that you have to be able to understand that the client you could work for may not be a national format, they may need alternate designs to tackle alternate countries and civilisations. Maag gave an example of working on a piece where he produced an arabic variation of the font he produced, and brought it back to the client who enjoyed the font, but thought it was the wrong way round, however, it was the client who hadn't correctly facilitated the different culture and how they read right to left rather than left to right, so they had to redesign the whole campaign. He used this as an example to show that you need to be more precise and thoughtful within new nationalities, to make sure that the mood of the font isn't lost by school boy errors in design.
 The mood is also something he described that I can fully understand, the fact is that they need a certain mood and font is how they do that in certain instances, and I feel this is something that can also be applied when producing Motion Design, because of the fact that you need to be thoughtful in the type you select in order for it to produce a certain mood or feeling that you want producing.