Joana Correia

Canberra started out as a part of a workshop I did when I was in Prague for a two day workshop with TypeTogether. I did it because I love travelling and meeting new people and in the meantime practice type design and learn from the best. I wanted to design a slab serif that it was usable and friendly both for editorial or branding. Afterwards I worked on the weights and refining the idea. In the meantime I worked on it and to be presented it in a type competition for the University of Canberra, where it was not chosen as a winner. I had some help drawing Canberra at this point by Joana Ranito (https://www.behance.net/JoanaRanito), a promising type designer, she helped in the design of weights and italic shapes with great talent. Later I upload it on the new platform of FontYou and got selected to finish it, which was a great motivator to continue working on it! Now you can see the results of all this collaborative work on FontYou! 

This is the year of Spain, typographically speaking. In June I will be attending the 6th Congreso de Tipografia so I can go and ‘geek out’ about typography as my friends say.

I have a sentimental connection to Spain having lived in Gijón for almost 4 years. I enjoy speaking spanish a lot, so it will be a good way to practice.

The Congreso in Valencia has been around for some years now and as typography is having a lot of attention at the moment it will be interesting to get to know the people behind some very interesting projects (Don Serifa, Tipografia Digital, Carlos del Toro) and catching up with friends. 

http://www.congresotipografia.com/

It has been a while since I wrote here, but now I’m back and with some news. My new website is online, it’s full of color and I hope you like it. The thought behind it was to show my work, but most importantly, to show a bit more of who I am and what I love doing, and that is designing letters, all kinds of letters. 

My website was designed by Surreal in Oporto by my dear friends Igor Pascoal and Tiago Pedras. 

Some of the typefaces shown on the website were the result of collaborations. This seems to be a trend in the Type world and I would really like to have more of these experiences. I would like to mention and thank Eben Sorkin for his patience and for always being happy to share his knowledge with other type designers. I am currently working with FontYou, as I mentioned in my previous post, and with whom I will launch new fonts soon. 

I would also like to thank all my friends, specially Rob McKaughan, Laura Meseguer, Julie Chauffier and Gerry Leonidas, my family, my loving mother and my boyfriend Filipe.

Enjoy the website!

http://joanacorreiatype.com/

FontYou is a new foundry that creates typefaces collaboratively. I have been using the beta version of the platform almost since the beginning (and liking it!) and I already finished a typeface collaborating with FontYou. (soon to come)

The platform allows for designers to share inspiration with letterings, letterforms and typefaces. I believe that it will be successful because one can see the development of great typefaces made from a simple sketch. A designer that always wanted to do his own typeface but he does not have the skills or the time, this is perfect for him! But as a type designer I find myself using it as tool for work, and also as collaboration with their type designers. I believe it helps on progressing your own work because of the feedback. The support you get from the design community brings back knowledge about what graphic designers are looking for. You can comment other designs, show your own and discover inspiration for new ones. I look forward to see more designs come to life. There is also a blog where you can post your type work as a beginning before going to the actual factory. 

Have fun at FontYou! 

This year I went to Lisbon to do a Pecha Kucha style presentation. It was the Pecha Kucha Nights organised by Inês Vidal and her colleagues. The chosen theme was creativity. I decided to talk about a few things that make me feel like I am on the right track in terms of being more creative and getting work done.

As most of you might know, there are times when one has very annoying blocking moments, and it seems that nothing works and that no ideas appear.

To understand what is creativity I did a bit of research. 

The origin of creativity is still quite unknown and this gives room for some mystical interpretations. Most people who go through this process understand this aspect of creativity. Often we do not know where that great idea or connection is coming from. But we could say that this unknown part is only 10% of the creative process. John Cleese talks about creativity here (link) and he describes creativity as a way to operate, how to do things, and not something that happens from thin air. 

Most of us have to work hard to create the best conditions to achieve more creative results to solve our problems. 

According to a Mihaily Csikszentmihalyi, an hungarian psychologist who studied creativity, there is a state called ‘flow’ where he identifies that this is where creativity happens.  During this state one has a feeling that time stops, we feel true happiness. The same scientist tells us that to reach  ‘flow’ we must have the necessary skills for the challenge that we propose ourselves to do. So it is vital to work hard to improve our skills and master the methods inherent in your business.

Here is a list of some of the things I do to help create that state of flow and a more fruitful process of doing the work! 

1- Be quiet

Find a place that you can isolate yourself and be quiet. It can be your studio or another place where you are allowed to be yourself and make mistakes without fear of social judgment. Create your own paradise. Quiet means that for a good chunk of time you should turn off all distractions. 

2- Play

Set a period of time with no distractions to stay with your problem during that time. Play with the problem, find different solutions, play. You need enough time to stop the mind from thinking about other trivial things, and then let your mind flow to the problem for some time. Feel free and enjoy your time. Here is important to know that no solution is wrong. Play with people you like and trust. 

3- Work hard

The third is to improve our abilities in what we want to be good at. To improve your craft it takes hard work, so work, work,  study, draw, repeat, ask for feedback. Show up even when you don’t feel like going to work, be professional about what you have chosen to do, and do it well. Learn all you can about your craft. Read books all the books you can on the subject.

4- Meditation

Meditation helps you to keep focus on a problem without wanting to stick with the first solution, essential to find more creative solutions and not give up.

Practicing meditation will help you to cope with the normal anxiety of an unsolved problem, resisting the temptation to go with the first solution. You will learn persistency, concentration and relaxation. Meditation will help you to relax and step back to see the whole picture. 

5- Challenge yourself

Finally, after we have dealt with all the factors above we now can increase our challenges. You can set new goals that make you wake up in the morning and work long hours for the pleasure of doing so, thus more easily to enter into the state of flow, where creativity happens more easily, and also we will be happier now because we are rewarded with positive feedback of a job well done. One way to challenge ourselves is to do something we fear, something we do not know whether we will be able to, take small steps towards the unknown. Thus paving the way for new connections in the brain, just more likely to create something new, a new interpretation of existing things. 

In short, creativity is a way of acting, a way of thinking, not just something that just happens. Now it’s time to implement. 

I'm proud to present you another blog using my Quando and Cantata from Google Web Fonts.This blog belongs to a very good friend of mine that is starting to take photography seriously. I hope you enjoy it here.  

In July I taught an ESAD LAB called ‘Introduction to GlyphsApp’.

This time the goal was to learn how to start using Glyphs for lettering and type projects. The students were professional designers and most of them had never done type design using a font editor. Some of them already knew FontLab but Glyphs is a different game. It has many tools that makes the design of a typeface more intuitive and you can see the result much better. For a designer to have this feedback on the screen is great. 

I believe that one of the best tools of Glyphs is the text tool, that allows you to set text and edit glyphs at the same time. Letters are drawn to work together, to form words and this way it makes much more sense. We could go on about all the major differences that made me adopt Glyphs a year ago, but they are too many! 

At the workshop we had some very nice results from the participants. They were able to build a few letters and create text. Most important is that in the end they felt comfortable using the software.

They also wanted to learn how to design a typeface, maybe in the future and on another workshop! 

Here are some of the results. 

So happy to see Quando in use in this page http://www.gilli.co/. 

I was very glad to read an email from Adam Gillitt saying he loves Quando and it's using it in his website. It looks great! 

I hope to make it a pro typeface soon. In the meantime you can use it on your website or desktop. (GoogleWebFonts)

A few months back Inês Melo and José Bártolo, the art director and editor for this publication asked me to develop a font from my master project. I worked on it to make useful for text and display. Thanks to Inês the magazine looks great and the font is showing off its character. Hope you like it. Here are some pictures of the font in use!

As if it wasn't enough travelling I went to Prague to be part of a TypeTogether workshop. Always a good excuse to travel. It was very interesting to meet designers from many different places. I developed the start of a slab serif, that I wanted to try for a while. Here are some pics. 

The last few weeks were spent on the road travelling. It was very exciting to be in Paris to be part of the Adobe FDK worksop at the Typofonderie. It was my second time doing it, but this time things were much more clear.

Three days spent learning how to optimize the production of a typeface family using FDKO tools. Using the terminal window it's kind of magical.

Thank you to Jean François Porchez, Veronique for hosting the event. And thanks to Sonia da Rocha and Miguel Sousa. It was also nice to be with all participants, like our friend type designer Rui Abreu. 

You can find some pictures here.

A showcase of Cantata and Quando being used on the same website. It looks great, nice to read. I hope you like it too! 

The handcoder website. 

Recently I did a lettering for a friend, her own company of translations and a blog about reading and writing. It featured in the recent blog about lettering and typography called 'The Daily Glyph', a really nice blog that ask for submissions of drawings of letterforms.

The design was supposed to look a bit formal but expressive. I'm more used to design text faces but I love lettering and hopefully more will come from this. 

Quando is a serifed text typeface inspired by brushy handwritten letters seen on an italian poster from the second world war. Quando is a flexible text typeface made for the web whose personality consistently shows in both small and large sizes. Quando's low contrast design helps it work better on screens and smaller sizes. Especially distinctive letterforms include letters like the a, g, x and Q. Quando's friendly feeling along with its clarity and familiarity makes it suitable for a broad range of uses.

Last week I went to Barcelona specifically to do a Lettering workshop with Ale Paul. I was very excited, a bit like a fan! Three years ago I had seen a talk by Ale Paul at ESAD in Portugal, where I was taking my BA. It had a great impact on my career choice to became a type designer. So, it was really great to go and learn from one of the best type designers in the world. 

We learned what makes a good lettering, how to try new shapes, experimenting on the paper is easier in early process. We learned what are the shapes that can be altered, like the endings and beginnings, also ascenders and descenders. Good lettering should have some weight so it survives in different sizes and mediums. 

Here are a few pictures from the workshop. I did the 'ink' on the bottom and helped editing the 'love' at the end.  

On the 28th at ESAD Matosinhos, me and Eben Sorkin gave a class about OpenType features. We had a very nice bunch of people, graphic designers, students from Porto. I believe it was a fruitful experience for all of us. Learning how to use OpenType features and understanding the historical context for them. From learning abou the design possibilitites OpenType gives you, I believe graphic designers will understand better the value of OpenType fonts, that have all of these possibilities, like contextual alternates, swashes, small caps, different kinds of numerals, etc. 

This class was a result of Eben's visit from the USA. It was great having him in Porto, and show around this beautiful city!