PINGPONG#3
Summer ping-pong: each week, a treasure from our collections will face a work from the “icons by Susan Kare” exhibition, according to a specific theme!
The Galfra typeface
Today, when we see a phone box in the street, we are brought back to another time. And along with the phone box came the precious phone book, Holy Graal of directories and a true « public service » book according to the typographer Ladislas Mandel. A tool used by all, even by people who did not read much, the directory must be easily readable, in every condition (at night, in a phone box for instance). It was for this directory that Ladislas Mandel was asked to create a new font, in order to ease the precious research – as well as the reading. He invented the rounded Galfra font, to set off in contrats with the geometrical strictness of the directory.
Designed at the end of the 1970s, Galfra was thought to be printed with cathode-ray tube machines, that compose letters assembling small points. Mandel thought about the form of the letters and anticipated the printing flaws the machine could create to modify in consequence his drawing. As such, the letters are formed by small rectangles simulating the printing screen. Doesn’t it ring a bell?
The cross stitch
How does cross-stitch get its place in an exhibition about icons and pixel? A strong emotional link and a seemlike pattern! Susan Kare explains she did a lot of embroidery with her mother and when she works with pixels, it reminds her of the patterns created thanks to the intertwined threads, taking a square shape.
Aheneah, a young Portugese artist, specialised in gigantic embroidery, arrived to the same conclusion. While she was in a design school, she realised when she saw her grandmother doing needlework that pixel and cross-stitch were exactly the same. She decided to adapt this traditional technique to contemporary graphics. Her goal? Gather different generations with poetical realisation. With her, knitting means family! She was taught by her great-grand-mother, her grand-mothers are seamstresses and she works with her mother. Never without her drill, she puts screws according to a computer-conceived design and connects them with wool threads to make the graphic appear.
