Tuesday, 7 May 2019; 6:30pm, The Galley Club at The Water Rats, Gray’s Inn Road, King’s Cross.
Pedro Arilla will talk about the Lost and Foundry project Pedro and how he went about transferring the crumbling, incomplete designs into working fonts, developed by Fontsmith, M&C Saatchi London and Line Form Color on behalf of the House of St Barnabas which is a private members club and charity based in Soho. The campaign saw the crumbling typefaces seen around the area recovered to be sold online as a collection of display fonts, to fund the House’s vital work with London’s homeless.
The House of St Barnabas is a social enterprise that aims to break the cycle of homelessness through its Employment Academy, a programme that works with people who have been affected by homelessness and supports them into lasting work. It does this by operating as a member’s club, with all profits from the club going to the Employment Academy.
Fontsmith worked with M&C Saatchi London to develop seven fonts from crumbling signs around Soho, with each named according to the specific content or location relevant to them, such as Berwick, Cattle & Son and Marlborough. The fonts were hand drawn and turned into fully functioning fonts by Fontsmith designers Stuart de Rozario and Pedro Arilla. This involved adapting and extending the missing characters to make useful and crafted designs out of them, with it taking 3 months to digitise and design a workable series of fonts. The fonts are available to purchase from the Fontsmith website, with all proceeds donated to The House of St Barnabas. Each purchase comes with a one month free membership to the House.
Pedro Arilla
Pedro Arilla is a type designer & typographer from Spain working at Fontsmith and living in London (UK). Alongside his day job at Fontsmith Pedro hosts one of the most well-known publications on typography in the Spanish language (Don Serifa), organises and teaches an international one-week type design workshop (Glíglifo), and owns a small letterpress studio. Before becoming a type designer Pedro ran a design agency in Spain, and previous to that worked as an editorial art director for a newspaper.
Previous projects and interests include editing a metal music webzine, a brief spell as a coder, a few high-school fanzines, travels around the world with a wedding in Las Vegas included, a dog called Bunbury, an unfinished novel, dozens of poems, and hundreds of books still unread on his shelves.
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