Villatype Interview — Anthony Swaneveld

Here is the 2nd installment of Villatype Interviews. We talked with designer Anthony Swaneveld about his current work and love of letters.

Please tell us briefly about where you work and what you do. I'm the principal and Design Director and well, everything, at Sandwich Creative, a graphic design business I started approximately 1.3 years ago.

What is behind the name Sandwich Creative? It came to me in a vision one night…. actually, no. I like sandwiches. That's pretty much it.

What was the inspiration behind the fringe festival program you recently designed? (see above). The identity for Toronto Fringe's 2009 season was a return to the days of the Great Depression and the kinds of paste-up advertising that was around in those days — in particular, that of the Federal Theater Project, which funded theatre performances during the Depression.

How did you select the typefaces? I looked for old, hand-rendered type, and type that was as authentic as possible in replicating the kind of woodblock and movable type used in those days. Once the type was placed in my document, I outlined everything and started to play, ignoring everything design school taught me about respecting the proportions of typefaces.

Did the client think it was awesome? Yes, they nearly collapsed from excitement. Once they saw the screenprinted versions on nice art paper, their reactions were ludicrous!

We actually asked the client, Gideon Arthurs (Executive Director of the Toronto Fringe Festival), if Anthony was either Cheap or Easy: Really, Anthony is neither cheap nor easy to work with. The man is a perfectionist and won’t settle for just any half-baked idea.

In fact, I love working on design concepts with him. He’s incredibly receptive and one of my great pleasures is sitting with him riffing on source images and themes. Cheap & Easy came about at the height of the economic turmoil last year. I’ve never seen a marketing concept take hold like this one – customers commented on it constantly. It just seem to fit the time and place, and the festival, so well.

Okay, back to Anthony: What are your 5 go-to typefaces? I actually don't really have those… I have favourites. Mostly I pick and choose based on the project. If you twisted my arm, I would have to say Trade Gothic, Farnham, Din, Tribute, and Poppi Sex'n'crime Two (just kidding!).

What was the best party you have ever been too? Short-term memory: a couple of weeks ago, when we had that Wii party and created a midget Michael Jackson so he would be driving the boat in Wii wakeboarding. Long-term memory: I can't pick just one… although the craziest party would have been ages ago at New Years Eve in Florence — those jerks throw champagne bottles on the ground all over the place. Hey guys, that's really dangerous!

You work on a lot of poster projects, is that by choice or have you been type-cast into this area of design? It was definitely by choice. My first real job was as Art Director for Soulpepper, who I still design for. Although full of other stuff, the posters were the gold on that job. Working with similar companies like Fringe provided other great creative outlets, which helped keep me sane.

What is your favourite type foundry? Probably Underware and Typetrust, but I tend to like typefaces instead of type foundries. As a studio/individual, I would say Schwartzco, Inc. 100% super-fantastic happy yes.

I heard you were opening a poster shop. Is this true and are we invited? Will there be free snacks? IT'S TRUE! I'm currently working with another company, The Production Kitchen, on a series of art posters we launched at Smash Gallery back in October and will start selling out of our shop, Public Office, which should be open in February. It's going to be a pretty cool place, especially for you nerdy design types. More info when it becomes available, and details will be at joinpublicoffice.com when I get that site designed. There will be hand-rendered and old type all over the place. Yay posters! (BYOS).

What would be your dream project (besides designing us some villatype t-shirts)? Probably designing a book that was letterpressed, with foil stamping and all sort of diecutting all over the place. Basically like a typical day for our friend Joe.

Is there something else we should know that we didn’t ask? For some reason, I'm sometimes good at doing accents and voices from movies. If I ever get drunk at one of those best parties, maybe my rendition of Andy from Little Britain will get on the interwebs and you can link to it.

Anthony Swaneveld is a Canadian designer currently based out of Toronto. He is a regular contributor to Villatype and we are pretty sure he likes t-shirts and pickles.

Villatype Interview - Joe Shouldice

Please tell us briefly about where you work and what you do.
Sagmeister Inc. Graphic Design.

Could you describe yourself in 5 words.
No.

This euro cents project for Urban Play is quite incredible, could you please give us a brief introduction to it?
Very Brief-A quarter of a million euro cents were sorted by shade and then placed according to a master plan across a 300sqm area to form the sentence "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better"

Do you relate with the statement "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better"?
Ummm... yes!

How did you source that many euro cents?
We had the most amazing team working with us in Amsterdam. Many, many aspects of this project happened only through the organizational skills/leadership and overall goodness of Maaike Gottschal. Who also just happens to live in Amsterdam's greatest tourist attraction, "the smallest house."

How does one go about designing with euro cents/what are the mathematics of doing such a large scale design with so many individual small parts?
The first thing you need to do is make sure your name is Richard The. The design was created using the standard Adobe Suite, and converted into a 4-colour greyscale, with each pixel representing a single coin. After that Richard wrote a program in Processing which analyzed the design. From the Amsterdam team we knew our location had 60cm x 60cm tiles on the ground. The entire design was broken down into squares that would translate to these tiles. In all we had 520 tiles with coins on them. Richard's program took the overall design, and created 520 individual sheets that showed exactly where to place each shade of penny on each tile.













closeup of the master plan, each square = one sheet = one tile. In each square each pixel = 1 coin.













Closeup of the master plan after one day.

Was it difficult to get people to understand the method of how the euro cents were to be placed?
Luckily Richard had it set up so that it was virtually foolproof (although we still did manage to have at least one tile a day done completely upsidedown).













Closeup of one sheet showing the different shades of coins and where they need to be placed n a single tile.













Clipboards ready for volunteers.

Were the euro cents sorted in any way? (colour, age etc)
Yes, the eurocents were all sorted into four different bins based upon their naturally aged shades.

What is with the blue edge on some of the euro cents?
Actually the entire backside of every coin was painted bright blue. This was to give the coins a secondary life as they were spent and spread across Amsterdam and eventually Europe. Also it allowed people to turn them over and create their own artwork/message... this happened quite a bit, even considering the short lifespan in which the piece was 'free'

How was the typeface chosen? Is it based on an existing face or was it created by the shape/usage of the euro cents?
It was custom made.

How many typeface ideas were tossed about?
The design was reworked and improved many, many times.

Were there any complications while making the mural?
We severely underestimated the time that it would take to sort all the coins by shade. This made for some tense moments as we tried to calculate how much of the piece was done and how much time we had until the opening. Luckily every time that things seems to be out of reach we would get an email informing us that a class of 20 people was planning on coming by to do a couple tiles each. Really we couldn't have been luckier with the amount of people that came out to help. On top of that it was a great way to meet lots of cool locals–many of whom came out almost every single day.

Did you have any specific expectations of what the process was going to be like? And did you have any expectations of what it would be like once completed?
Personally I had intentionally tried not to think too much about what might happen... I think I had played out two possible (and obvious) scenarios, aside from that I was truly just excited for ANYTHING to happen.

Would you do something like this ever again?
Absolutely!

The interviewee - Joe Shouldice is a Canadian graphic designer currently based out of Brooklyn, New York. He is a regular contributor to Villatype and I am pretty sure he likes pies and the wilderness.

The Interviewer - Jenn Lawrence is a Canadian graphic designer based in Toronto. She is a regular contributor to Villatype and I am fairly certain she likes pies and kites.

Photos courtesy of: Mr. Dennis de Groot of www.punchdouble.com "A rad guy and good photographer." - Joe