Roger Black
Starting with LA in 1972, Roger has been chief art director or design consultant for publications of all kinds, all over the world. Among them: Rolling Stone, Outside, New York, The New York Times, Newsweek, Esquire, Fast Company, Smart Money, Reader’s Digest, The Los Angeles Times,MSNBC.com, Bloomberg.com, The Washington Post, Semana (Colombia), Panorama (Italy), The Straits Times (Singapore), Kompas (Indonesia), Tages Anzeiger (Switzerland), Placar (Brazil), Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden), Nomad Editions, Scientific American, and Always On Network.
Recently he’s turned his attention back to Asia. In March 2014 his design for the Asia Tatler magazines was launched, with a new Font Bureau custom typeface, Forma.
Now he’s helping with Font Bureau’s efforts in Asia and is playing a larger role in its design and marketing. Roger spends some down-time at homes in Hong Kong and Pass-a-Grille, Florida.
BITS MMXIV International Workshop
Roger Black
November 14, 2014.
Workshop room, TCDC
1.30 - 3.30 pm.
Available slots : 10 people
"Type brand clinic"
Bring your typographical branding work-in-progress for a check-up and diagnosis and prescription. If needed, there can hands-on therapy—if you bring your laptop.
Or submit a finished bit of type branding for review.
Roger Black will analyze, and challenge the project, and see how it works, or what might be improved. There’ll will be discussion, with questions and comments by workshop participants. The session will conclude with some suggestions for "next steps" and “what we’ve learned."
BITS MMXIV International Conference
Roger Black
November 16, 2014.
BACC
10.30 - 11.30 am.
"Your type is your brand"
Business people still think tat their products and services are their brands. A little industrial design, a little packaging, and the brand emerges. But in the new information economy, services are digital, and products are displayed on flat screens, with type. Customer experience becomes user experience. Content is king. So that makes design . . . queen?
Considering the amount of interaction with customers that involves fonts, it’s a wonder that more enterprises have not invested in unique typefaces. Custom fonts. Most still make do with the great number of typefaces available in the analog world. It’s possible to create an individual look in print, on products, in stores and advertising, but only a fraction of the the fonts are available as web fonts. So we see a lot of Georgia and Verdana . . . and Arial.
Roger Black talks about some of the history of type branding. He recounts case studies in publication design, where a particular voice and personality has been achieved through a typeface or typographical style. He shows examples of custom fonts used for an entire brand—from the logotype to the digital UI. And finally he takes up the issue of Unicode type branding, where the design has to combine glyphs for Latin, CKJ, Hindic, Arabic and the so-called minority scripts.
A brand, it’s been said, is what people think of you when you are not there. Black shows how type branding can endure.