In conversation with Hansje van Halem

Hansje van Halem is known for her mesmerizing pattern designs … or are they letters? We caught up with the master of ornamental typography to hear about her experiments with legibility

- RUTH HAMILTON

At what point does a letter stop being a letter? It’s a question that Hansje van Halem constantly tackles in her work. The graphic designer’s creations can be found on posters, books, and increasingly out in the wild, in locations such as bike tunnels and airports. For the past three years, she has been the head designer for Dutch music festival Lowlands, where her type design scheme has been transformed into a flexible algorithm for the whole team to work with.

Van Halem talked through her complex, mesmerizing body of work at the recent Design Manchester Festival. We spoke to her in a break about typographic algorithms, old-school lettering machines, and pushing the boundaries of legibility.

In your words, how would you describe your typographic style?

It’s experimental, of course. It’s researching the balance between legibility and illegibility; between pattern and type. And it focuses on texture and ornament.

You’ve spoken about the ‘rules’ of type design. In your work you’re pushing against these rules. Is that what interests you about working with letters?

With pattern design there are no rules except for the visual aspect of it – what size will it be used? Will it still be coherent? There has to be a connection, you have to be able to define a direction in the pattern or shapes in the pattern. But then you have free rein, you can decide whatever. For type design the boundaries are much smaller, much more tight. You have a letter shape, and if you let it grow too much it becomes a blob. And if you shrink it too thin, in the middle there is no design space – because I don’t design an outline, I design texture and let the texture define the shape of the letter.

You often use algorithms in your design process, and sometimes these yield surprises…