Recipes for Connecting is a project by the A—Z Collective, featuring “recipe” submissions from an international group of creatives, community builders, kids-at-heart, collectives, educators, and other cohorts who believe in the power of a simple idea to bring people closer together. These “recipes” illustrate many different methods of connecting—offering practical social tools, humorous prompts, gentle reminders, alternative structures of communication, and scrumptious meals. Together they create a patchwork of insights into “connecting” on individual, interpersonal, human, non-human, and collective levels.

Each visitor is invited to select and acquire the pages they like the most, bind them on-site, and create a personalized compendium. It is aimed at students and professionals alike, from design enthusiasts to community builders.

After being presented in Berlin and México City, the chapter of Recipes for Connecting was developed for Barcelona Design Week by Laura Meseguer and Anja Lutz (A—Z) featuring many new contributions by designers from Berlin and Barcelona: Alex Jordan, Andrea Tinnes, Anja Lutz, Anne-Christin Plate, April Gertler, Atipus, Catrin Sonnabend, Cem Eskinazi, Claudia de la Torre, Eider Corral, Emily Smith, Eunjung Kwak, Erica Fustero, Formal Settings, Francisca Torres, Gemma Terol, George Titheridge, Hounyeh Kim, Josepha Conrad, Judy Kaufmann, Judy Smith, Kristina Wedel, Karen Runge, Laia Soler, Lan Kroeger, Laura Meseguer, Lisa Baumgarten, María Carmona, Maria Montes, María Yin, Marisa Lacarta, Mark Bohle, Martí Guixé, Mela Dávila Freire, Niklaus Troxler, Orlando, Pol Pérez, Rachael Dunstan, Ramón Tejada, RM, Sarah Boris, Silvia Sfligiotti, Sonia Genoher Valentí, Sonsoles Llorens, Susan Ploetz and Tulah Stanford.

Nowadays it is part of the Design Biennale in Matosinhos, Portugal

Thank to all for their unique contributions and to our collaborators and supporters!

Mentions:
Premis Ciutat de Barcelona 2024, in the category of Fashion and Design
The jury agrees to give a special mention to Laura Meseguer and Anja Lutz for the project Recipes for Connecting,
given the innovative way of bringing together local and international creators with a modest proposal,
but at the same time with high design quality.

Fabulosa embodies a unique vision, merging historical influences from the ‘fat face’ typography style and the exuberant flair of Ed Benguiat’s Caslon Black Swash, designed for Photo Lettering, Inc. around the 1960s. The ‘fat face’ style, with its exaggerated strokes, is believed to have been pioneered by typefounder Robert Thorne (1753–1820) in the early 19th century. Thorne’s innovation was a robust evolution of the modern type styles, characterized by their strong contrast and heavy serifs. Caslon Black Swash, on the other hand, is a vivid representation of mid-20th-century typographic creativity. Its swashes and decorative flourishes evoke a sense of nostalgia, harking back to the ornate letterforms of earlier centuries while also fitting into the vibrant graphic culture of the 70s. Drawing from these sources of inspiration and her love for stencils, Laura set out to create Fabulosa. Her vision was to craft a typeface that seamlessly blended the retro with the fantastical, infusing it with a touch of glamour.  Fabulosa stands out not just as a font but as a statement piece,timeless and contemporary, perfect for projects that seek to evoke a sense of stylish nostalgia while also making a bold visual impact to be used in a variety of contexts, from high-fashion magazines to quirky indie film posters.

What is Ella?

The shared characters
The Roman, Uncial and Rustic styles share a unique lowercase set that unifies the characteristics of the three styles, they also share numerals and punctuation. It is a conceptual approach to the fact that the three calligraphic styles were coexisting at the same historical time. The large x-height and triangular serifs of the lowercase bring sharpness while keeping some ductus and warmth.

The starting point: Typographers-in-Residence 2021: “Mujeres Hispanas y Tipografía”
ELLA was initiated as a custom research project HMCT Typographers-in- Residence program in 2021. It was called Mujeres Hispanas y Tipografía, and reflects the influences that individual cultures and histories had on the investigations of five designers, researchers and educators—embedded in Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru—and what they deemed important and relevant to their interest in language, graphic design and typography.

Laura Meseguer (Spain) — Lettering & Type Design
Marina Garone (México) — Researcher & Historian
Jimena Gamio (Peru/Los Angeles) — Lettering, Sign Painting, Typography
Tipastype: Sandra García (Colombia) & Dafne Martínez (México) — Calligraphy & Type Design

If you are interested , you can watch the video of our Project Presentations here.
As the result of the research, the HCMT has published a superb bilingual catalog, that explains the project in deep compiling all the research and work process. You can purchase it here.

Prizes:
TDC 2023 winner. Certificate of Typographic Excellence
ISTD International Typographic Awards 2024

Workshop “From Calligraphy to the typographic letter”
Split Art Academy, Croatia
17—19 April 2024

Objectives: to experiment with different stages in the evolution of modern typography. In the early years of typography, the created forms aimed to faithfully reproduce the appearance of manuscripts, and their creators started creating alphabets that were not exact copies of the popular calligraphic models. In a way, the true type design emerges with the types cut by Nicolas Jenson in the second half of the 15th century. He designed a series of letters that, while recognizable as humanistic, were not exact replicas of those used in the manuscripts of the time. At this moment, type design takes on its creative identity and understands that a new medium opens up new expressive possibilities

Practise: to reproduce this process with the workshop students, as a sort of methodology for type design.

Schedule:

Day 1
— Carolingian calligraphy practice with double pencil, lowercase key letters
— Completing the alphabet (a-z). Selection of the best letters

Day 2
— Letter Sketching and principles of type design
— Sketching, rhythm and spacing

Day 3
— Function and purpose. Composition of words and sentences
— Exhibition, presentation and feedback

Results: The outcomes far exceeded expectations, especially given the varying levels of preparation and time invested. However, the students demonstrated commendable dedication, working diligently and collaboratively with mutual respect. Their commitment undoubtedly contributed to the exceptional results achieved. 🙌

Statement, Skill and Performance

On the last 8th of May of 2021, and under the title of Experimental Wall painting Performance Workshop, Guido de Boer conducted an unusual on day lettering workshop at the former Visions, in Barcelona. The workshop revolved around the idea, of What do you want to say? with the intention of putting the mind and the hand to work together, in the favour of the message. After showing us some examples, the students, including Laura,  could distillate the ideas behind it and how those defined the three parts of the workshop: Statement (what you say), Skill (what you do) and Performance (how you do it).

The Statement
What is a Statement? A definite or clear expression of something in speech or writing. Laura found that defining it was the most difficult part, for instance. The Statement shouldn’t be a question, because you don’t know the answers, but something that is in your mind at that moment, so she started thinking “What to say when you don’t know what to say” and then she realised that the fact of ‘saying it’, was enough but ‘meaning it’, as a way to let others approaching you.

The Skill
The idea of not having expectations was also key to the process, together with playfulness and the use of big paper and bigger tools than pencil to sketch. Despite Laura could choose lettering or type, she decided to use writing to follow Guido’s path of using the hand, the wrist, the arm, the shoulder and the body 🙂
Laura tried different surfaces, writing tools and inks, being the round brush and black china ink on the gallery wall, the best options for her purpose, simple, honest and direct.

The Performance
It consisted of the wall painting recorded under Guido’s eye. Laura wrote “say it” on a semi-circular shape, covering the amount of space she could afford with her extended arms. Please watch the movie 🙂 and the reel about this workshop at his instagram account.

L’homenatge a una sola lletra és un homenatge a tota la cultura.
The one-letter tribute is a tribute to the whole culture.
—Joan Costa

The context

This typographic poster was designed for the occasion of the collective exhibition Tipografia’m, presented at the MuVIM in Valencia, Spain collecting the work of 35 designers.  It is the second time Laura exhibit there, the first was back in 2005 when Carlos Pérez and the much-missed Paco Bascuñán as the curator, who invited Laura to participate at the D’après: Versions, ironies i divertiments exhibition.
This time the curators were Begoña Jordá and Nereida Tarazona and it was organized by the “Máster en Artes Gráficas” from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería del Diseño de la Universitat Politécnica de València.

The concept
In the words of the curators: “The exhibition bears this title because it focuses on the character M, the thirteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet. Starting from this letter, we seek to experiment graphically and conceptually using any technique to vindicate the formal role of the letter in design and art. Isolating any character from its usual context (the word, the line, the paragraph, the page…), we try to move it away from the domain of linguistics and bring it closer to the field of the visual, to intervene in it as a pure object. formal. All this will give greater visibility to the work of so many type designers who, with their effort and talent, have given a special and unique character to each designed letter M.

Tipografia’m, is the creative vindication of this feeling. The letter before being written, in its individual identity as a pure pictographic form. Not subject to a code and laws that have been imposed on it.”

M for Modular
Laura’s idea came after observing the anatomy of the capital M which is modular, symmetrical, solid, wide, present … so she decided to represent it as an architectural element, without neglecting the aesthetic appearance of the composition. To achieve this, each «M» of the composition is based on an evolution of the previous one, where reduced counter forms, accompanied by a rotation, becoming something else, more abstract, losing its more orthodox figuration.
She connected this poster to her ongoing «Lettering Extravaganza» poster series, initiated at her residence at the AGA LAB in Amsterdam.

Invisible is a typographic installation that wants to highlight the value of the shop city signs and vindicates this graphic heritage as a cultural capital to be preserved. With this project, Meseguer gives an extraordinary representation of one of her usual practices which consists of walking, looking, photographing, documenting and collecting urban signs before they disappear in the process of transforming cities. “That type and signs enter the artistic space imply giving it the relevance it has and creates awareness about its cultural, social, historical and political role”. Meseguer, eager to make the universe of typography visible, close and comprehensible, masterfully connects it with other contemporary cultural practices.

The Exhibition at the Centre d’Art La Panera
Invisible happened at the Centre d’Art Contemporani La Panera in Lleida (Spain), where it had two parts, Invisible and Sisters. Lletres i paraules.

After revisiting the signs of shops in Lleida, still in operation,  and others that have already disappeared, Laura proposed different actions. Ten lettering signs were temporarily displayed on a seventeen-meter wall, along with a video showing the process of rescue and recovery of those signs which enter the museum for the first time. The Invisible title is displayed with a custom-designed neon sign and some of Laura’s typefaces giving life to a text by the sociologist Mariona Lladonosa and the designer Pau Llop. There the visitors can discover typefaces such as Qandus Latin, or Sisters. The final intervention of Laura is the posters with the letters ABC, a new expression born from reinterpreting the signs of Lleida, as an alliance between the old and the new.

Sisters. Lletres i paraules 
The exhibition had a small continuation for children in the miniPanera space . This is a facility to play with the Sisters typographic family. By building letters and words by parts of modules, kids (and not only kids) can understand how harmony plays a key role when designing alphabets, but also that imagination has no limits. The installation is provided with ten custom-designed stencil templates, the resulting parts after laser cutting them, a lightbox and a tiny library. With those kids can get inspired, read and create letters in many ways.

Acknowledgements
The celebration of this exhibition would not have been possible without all the people who have collaborated in one way or another: Corsetería LIS, Jaume Burgues, Jaume Claramunt, Divina Drudis, Esther Farré, Familia Buixadera Benseny, Familia Tores Vidal, Isidre Montagut, Pollería Huevería El Cisne, Carmen Alarcón, Concejalía de Consumo, Comercio, Mercados y Participación, Lleida, Tonet Rufié, Carme Sisó Gispert, Jaume Sisó Calderó and his daughters.
Gràcies! ¡Gracias! Thank you!

Read more about Invisible at Flat Magazine

Sisters, a lively set of stencil display typefaces

SISTERS is a lively set of stencil display typefaces designed by Laura Meseguer. The family features four fresh fonts that share foundational principles of construction yet complement each other—as sisters do—by celebrating their differences. Variations in contrast, weight, and design characteristics result in four distinct styles dubbed One through Four. This cool quartet contains no lowercase, asserting the family’s rightful place in the titling typography space. Sisters allows you to communicate in the most of the languages based on the Latin alphabet. The available encodings are: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin-2 Central European; Latin Plus.

Font of the Month
Sisters was chosen by Stephen Heller as “Font of the Month” where he wrote: Stencil letters, as a genre, have both a timeless and timely quality. They straddle the gamut in their respective looks and timeframes, from industrial functionality to symbolic modernity to futurist stylism. The four-member family called “Sisters One”, “Two”, “Three” and “Four” elegantly designed by Laura Meseguer covers the entire aesthetic and chronological scope. (…) “Sisters” is influenced by Meseguer’s large collection of vintage art deco examples of type specimens, printed ephemera, street and shop signs, and placards, much of which she has shared in situ in her frequent social media posts. Knowing Meseguer’s roots contributes to an appreciation of her exacting contemporary alphabets. These “Sisters” are designed to get along well with each other and can be used individually or in mix-and-match combinations. The four “Sisters” are, however, an insular, self-contained unit that does not work in harmony with members of other families. So, it is advised to avoid pairing them even with first cousins, aunts, or uncles. Meseguer has created a closely knit system that works beautifully within the nuclear family structure.

SISTERS has been widely used by designers all over, and also it had its own space at la Minipanera de Lleida and at The Beautiful People exhibition, where the Sisters Wall, a piece of 8×2 metres consisted of an explosion of words that claim women’s relevance not only in design but in society.

If you want to see SISTERS in use, please visit this page Sisters in use

Understanding Type Design as a Tool for Graphic Designers

Stencil Type Design has been proven as a great way to explain and practice the principles underlying the design of typefaces.
In this workshop, we will offer participants the possibility of creating the main characters of an alphabet constructed with a limited amount of elements. We will design typographic characters to compose a word, a message, or a logo, that will serve later, to cut out stencils in a resistant material to be painted or printed. It can be solved manually or digitally.

Learning Outcomes
—To understand and practice the principles underlying the design of typefaces.
—Set the basis for creating a full alphabet from a few existing characters.
—Reflect on the role of typography in the field of identity and experience the design of custom types. All together can be understood as ‘type design as a tool for designers’.

Preparation
All participants will have to do preliminary research about stencil sentences or words found in the streets or in articles or old catalogs. They will serve as the starting point for the project. From that material, we will extract the alphabets to work on, and define the parts, adapting the work process to each style.

Required Materials
—Drawing materials: pencil, eraser, and ruler
—Supports: white paper, graph paper, onion paper.
—Optional: Laptop, scanner, photocopy machine, lightbox.
In the first two sessions, we will all be sketching by hand, the next two can be manual or digital drawing. In case the participant wants to continue digital, he or she will have to be skilled and autonomous in vector drawing design.

If you are interested in taking this workshop to your school, please send an email to us.

Mural painting workshop at IED Kunsthal Bilbao

At the beginning of the year, Laura carried out her first mural typography workshop in the week of multi/interdisciplinary workshops at IED Kunsthal in Bilbao, together with Ruth Juan and facilitated by Eider Corral.

The purpose of the workshop “Gigatype” was to unite typography and mural painting, exploring the capacity of messages for urban transformation, based on the students’ personal search and instincts. We gathered 17 students from different disciplines and courses, and it was a unique experience, for many reasons but mainly for the experience and result of the collective work.

The proposal consisted of dividing the 20-hour workshop into 3 phases:

1. Conceptualisation and typography
In the first conceptual part, we searched for a word or short phrase representing the transformation, personal and of the school itself, located in Zorrotzaurre, a part of Bilbao that is changing daily.

2. Strategy and execution
In the second part, we defined a typographic style that would serve the purpose, taking into account the multiple conditioning factors: time, dimensions, space and technique -elements that undoubtedly mark the process that results in a final result that is not 100% predefined. In the second part, Ruth Juan masterfully directed the transfer and painting of the word on a 4.47 x 6 m high wall, where we all participated 🙂

3. Documentation of the process
And finally, in the third part, we sought to relate and document the process from beginning to end, based on a thread freely chosen by the students. The document is what remains as a testimony of their work, creativity and passion.

Goals
– To create a typographic mural.
– Define a unique and collective message.
– Define the typographic style appropriate to the message, available space and technique.
– The final result arises from the process and the balance between concept, creativity, time and technique.

Premises or conditioning factors
– 4.47 x 6 m high wall.
– Collective message reduced to a maximum of 3 words
– 17 students who will share tasks
– Time: 8 h for conceptualisation + 12 h for painting

After two days of work, the result of the first part was:

Word
LOADING

Typographic style
– Uppercase or tall letters for optimal legibility.
– “Sans Serif”style to let the verbal message take centre stage.
– Drawn ad hoc in ultra-condensed proportion adapted to occupy all the space.
– Black background and white letters, to gain impact in space.
– Reinforcement of the meaning by the repetition of the word and the elasticity of three letters occupying the entire height.

Technique
– Tools: Rollers and brushes
– Materials: acrylic paint