Crystian Cruz
Crystian Cruz is a Brazilian graphic designer with broad experience in editorial design and typography. He holds a Master in Typeface Design from Reading University (UK) and is currently undertaking a PhD and teaching at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research is exploring creative ways to use digital typography as a medium to provoke engagement to content.
As a practitioner, Crystian has worked for more than a decade as Creative Director of leading magazines and newspapers, and as Type Director at Africa, a notorious Brazilian advertising agency. He has been working as an independent consultant since 2014.
Specialized in creating bespoke fonts for editorial design and advertising, he is always trying to find ways to tweak type features to solve specific design problems. This approach led to the invention of type behaviours such as insertion of bar charts in fonts and an OpenType feature to automatically condense letters at the end of each text line.
Crystian is continuously featured in magazines and books related to Brazilian design and typographic scene and has been working as a part-time lecturer in typography and graphic design in bachelor and postgraduate courses in several institutions for the last 17 years. Since 2017 he is contributing to the international typographic scene as a board member of ATypI.
BITS9 Conference
Crystian Cruz
October 12, 2019
Morning Session
10:00am - 12:00pm
at Grand Ballroom Fl.2, Le Meridien Chiang Mai
“Contemporary approaches for Latin typewriter fonts”
It is almost impossible to refer to typography in the mid-twenty-century without coming to mind the aesthetics of typewriter typefaces and its sturdy letterforms with monospaced widths, all set at the same point size. With the rise of the computer, typewriters became history. However, the spirit of typewriter fonts is still present in the digital realm. Mainly for the adoption of monospaced fonts for computer programming and Hollywood scripts, but also the allure of the unique raw aesthetic of the letters striking the paper. So many revivals of typewriter fonts and new interpretations are out there. However, it brings some questions: Do we need them at all? What does that aesthetic represent out of context? Lastly, is there room for experimenting with monospaced letterforms that are not either emulating typewriter typefaces or aiming for a futuristic look?