I never wrote anything about the title text for Junksphere and I should because I put a lot into it. It doesn’t use any kind of digital font (although there are some out there that are going for something very similar). I made it by hand in the tradition of Willem Sandberg.
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| Willem Sandberg, 1961 |
Sandberg was born in 1897 and studied art in Amsterdam. He traveled Europe learning the theory and application of what would become the fundamental elements of modern graphic design, working as an apprentice printer in Switzerland and studying pictographic systems in Vienna. From 1928-1941 he worked with the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and eventually became the curator of modern art there.
By 1941, the Nazis were occupying the Netherlands, and Sandberg was involved in the resistance. As an experienced typographer, his specialty was preparing forged documents to help Jews and other targets of the regime survive and escape. Once the Nazis and their local collaborators noticed the forgeries, they started checking their records more carefully, and catching more victims. So the Resistance Council bombed the Amsterdam Public Records Office, an attack Sandberg helped plan. Thousands of files were destroyed, and the effectiveness of the forgeries was largely restored. Eleven of Sandberg’s comrades were arrested and executed.
From 1943 to 1945, he went into hiding. Separated from the usual tools of his trade, Sandberg produced a series of 19 zines called Experimenta Typographica, full of visual poetry, marxist theory, and letterforms made of torn paper.
Today, Sandberg is more well-known for this work than for the heroic actions that led to it. This is a testament to the work’s value, but the circumstances are vital to understanding Sandberg’s artistic choices.
For Junksphere’s title text, I wanted to apply the ideas explored in Experimenta Typographica, as a tribute to Willem Sandberg’s life and work. Like I mentioned earlier, there are digital typefaces based on his torn paper letters available, but I knew it wouldn’t come out right unless I did it myself by hand.
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| use the fridge for reference cause the dog is deceptively big |
I used the floorboards as parallels to keep the proportions of the letters consistent. A half hour or so of scanning letters later I was editing out backgrounds and playing with size, color and positioning on my desktop computer, a tool Sandberg could never have imagined.
And it worked! Turns out a visual language forged in the wreckage of Europe at the height of World War II and physically built out of scraps fits the vibe of a junkyard planet really fuckin well. Who knew?
