Irene Vlachou

Irene
Vlachou

ECAL Resident at La Becque, spring semester 2022

BIO

Irene Vlachou, born in 1981, is based in Athens, Greece. She gained her Masters in type design at the University of Reading in 2004. She subsequently started to collaborate with international type foundries and corporations, working as a type designer and as a Greek type consultant. In 2012, she released Colvert Greek with typographies.fr. From 2013 to 2019, she was a senior designer and variable font expert at Type-Together. She has been participating since 2017 in the Google Summer of Code on behalf of the Greek Open Source Community (GFOSS), as a mentor on the expansion of Greek libre fonts. She is currently working full time freelancing Greek and variable font for retail and OEM/System fonts. In 2017, in collaboration with Laurenz Brunner, she designed the Greek counterpart of the Documenta14 exhibition’s identity font, Bradford Greek. She launched FauxFoundry (2019), together with Laurence Penney, a webfont service using variable font technology that provides automatic fallback fonts when the main font lacks characters. She is a guest lecturer for the MA in Type Design and the BA in Graphic Design at ECAL.

Enseignements

TYPE DESIGN

Giacomo Bastianelli – Quarto

with Matthieu Cortat, Irene Vlachou

Unlike the more traditional five-lined musical stave, a graphic score is a different way of notating a piece of music. Originally called “eye music,” it first appeared in its modern form in the 1950s, when notation became more and more influenced by a dialogue with painting, installations, and performativity. These conceptions required a new language and a unique reading of what it is to be musical. Quarto aims to revisit the idea of graphic scores in a contemporary tone, connecting MIDI technology with variable fonts and producing an experience that could take the form of an interactive/synesthetic performance or a piece of printed visual music with its own autonomy, independent of sound.

TYPE DESIGN

Karima Deghayli – Yameen and Meel

with Alice Savoie, Irene Vlachou

As the world becomes increasingly connected, the need for multiscript type families grows significantly. Yameen is a variable multiscript typeface covering Arabic and Latin. Designed for text, its weights range from regular to bold. The Arabic was inspired by Naskh calligraphy, retaining in its outlines the character of the Qalam. The Latin forms present the same sharp aesthetic taken from the parallel pen offering a calligraphic interpretation of old-style typefaces. Preserving both scripts’ authenticity, Yameen is designed for harmonious bilingual typesetting. Meel is an Arabic display font inspired by various sources: from vintage music albums to vernacular Beirut type. Exploring the Ruqaa style, its boldness excels in large sizes and its flowing character merges the tool and the digital.

TYPE DESIGN

Sam Fagnart – Mirai Toshi

with Irene Vlachou, Alice Savoie

Inspired by archival documents and the graphic design culture of the late 60s and early 70s, Mirai Toshi (The City of the Future) is a visual experimentation in type design which gave birth to two typefaces, Nisego and Metago. Stemming from the module-driven architecture of the Metabolist movement, Metago is a display typeface with a pixel-like quality, but whose strokes and elements are linked together in a heavily constructed yet organic structure. Alongside it stands Nisego, designed with the 70s Japanese Grotesk typefaces in mind, with its rationalised yet calligraphic shapes. The Latin version of Nisego consists of three text cuts, with matching italics, complemented by six all-purpose cuts, from the versatile Medium to the more display-oriented Black.