scroll down for info

Dear visitor,

You found a key to the Secret Type Garden.

Sneak in through the garden gate and take a walk amidst the abundance of voices and characters. You are invited to idle in an endless terrain, where a multitude of species coexist and flourish, forming families, habitats and landscapes.

The Secret Type Garden is a generative typographic poem without words conceived by artist duoStudio Pointer*as a reaction to the typeface collection and visual language of type designerCéline Hurka.

Céline approaches her typefaces as a form of visual storytelling, questioning the design conventions that have prevailed for the last hundreds of years of cultural production. Layers of hidden meanings are tied into her character-sets – each referring to personal stories, (critiques of) type history, and pop-culture references. In many respects, her approach to type design aligns with Studio Pointer*s practice of utilizing code to create fictional narratives, which they refer to as software fiction. This work is a partVariable Lab, an ongoing exchange between Céline and Studio Pointer* on the current state of variable typography and type design.

The Secret Type Garden is an exploration of the relationship between typographic voice, storytelling and the nature of digital font formats. Typefaces are simultaneously pieces of fiction and tools. They are small entities of software – perhaps the most consumed pieces of digital technology of all time. Here, they transcend their utilitarian nature, escaping their day jobs in the misty wilderness. Visitors of the garden are invited to harvest specimens that they can bring home to their local hard drives.*

*To harvest a creature please approach it gently and, once it is glowing, press H on your keyboard. It will be downloaded to your machine and you may use it for any non-commercial purpose with a credit to Studio Pointer* and Céline Hurka.