I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be teaching lettering workshop at Type Directors Club in New York next June.
In this hands-on intensive workshop you will drive the process of drawing and refining custom lettering. In this one-day session you will be introduced to effective techniques to create a lettering from scratch. It is ideal for beginners as well as advanced letterers who want to improve their technique. You will walk away from this workshop with a sharper eye when working with typography and with practical tools to improve your own creative work. Read more and book your place.
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Although the combination of rich content and a good presenter are seemingly the recipe for a good presentation, there's infinite ways to make these two work together.
Until the date I have attended a number of design talks with very different profiles: research based, emotional, historical, hysterical, theatrical. Although I couldn't derive a formula I have put together a number of key points that I think contribute to making a good, engaging presentation, while enjoying as a speaker (as much as you can!).
I consider myself a relatively outgoing person who can start a conversation pretty easily. Surprisingly, it took me a lot of work to actually get that shine through my presentations. I have worked really hard to improve my public speaking skills and to overcome my shaky-legs-syndrome whenever I go on stage. That required actually going on stage myself several times as well as attending other talks as part of the audience.
If you're interested in giving more talks, this article might be of help.
Good content
Identify a handful of things you want to convey
Rather than telling million stories, focus on conveying a few things with your presentation. Determining a couple of key points will help you organise your information and your slides. Your presentation should reflect your approach to what you do, whether that is research based, experimental or very technical.
Create value with your talk
Anyone in the public can access your website and navigate through the projects. Pushing your clicker while saying “And I have this other project that I did for…” is unprofessional and boring. Your talk should add value to your work and to the audience. What lead you do that, how you came up with that idea? What were your inspirations and personal motivations?
Address your presentation to your audience
Does your audience have deep knowledge on the topic you’re speaking about? Great! You can take the chance to get all nerdy and speak technical language. Now if the audience is not, put some effort into finding the way to talk with easy words and elaborate on certain concepts.
Mind possible translation issues
Expressions may have different meanings across languages. I’m a native spanish speaker and the expression “I hate this or that” is of coloquial used in spanish for stressing your dislikes. I discover recently that the word “hate” in English is pretty strong and wouldn't be nicely received by an audience. Check your script twice, specially when presenting in a foreign language.
Nice content
Graphics and illustrations
Your visuals should look smart and be a good representation of your work. Select carefully the images that illustrate best what you’re saying and sincronize the visuals with your script. Stay away from long introductions to projects followed by a silent slide-show of pictures.
Your slides
Prefer dark backgrounds for your slides and avoid big chuncks of text. Well, that was too subtle: big chunks of text on slides are no go. If you happen to use a quote, or a tweet or a passage of a book, take a minute to stop, read that text to your audience and continue speaking. People will try to read anything that shows up on your slides and won't be listening while doing that.
Proper delivery
Find your tone
Many say that a good joke is always welcome. I think that it is not at all necessary to make an engaging presentation. There’s a number of ways to engage your audience: a story, an emotional experience, an anecdote, a good research, a joke. Timing is everything and a bad joke at the wrong moment may just lead to an uncomfortable moment.
Practice your presentation
Even when you’re a natural born presenter, learning your script, far from making your presentation overplayed allows you to actually be able to improvise and act naturally. When you know your talk by heart, your body gets more relaxed and it becomes a second level of language.
Control the length of the presentation
Ask the organisation what is your time slot and don’t go over that. The common length of a presentation at a design conference fluctuates between 35 to 50 minutes (I think that the ideal length goes from 35 to 40 minutes). Going over time is disrespectful to the organisation, to the audience and to other speakers, too.
Reading vs speaking to the audience
Seeing someone going on stage with a stack of papers instantly sweeps away the 50% of my interest. Even when practiced ahead, the rythm of a read presentation is radically more flat to the ones that speak to the audience directly. If you don’t feel confident enough to do that, having a bunch of notes on your keynote presentation may help you navigate without forgetting any point.
Cutting the nervousness
Speaking to the whole audience
My heart is often beating fast when I go on stage and one of the tricks I use to deal with that is to look at the audience and smile. The audience is real people, look at them! That said, don’t focus on that guy on a red t-shirt sitting on a first road. Raise your head, talk to all of them.
Know the stage
Another thing that helps me deal with my nervousness before going on stage is to be there before speaking. Take the opportunity to go on stage at a refreshment break or before the conference starts.
Enjoy yourself
As a speaker, I’m pretty sure that the best talks I gave are the ones I enjoyed the most. As part of the audience, I remember those talks where the speaker seemed to be enjoying as well. As soon as you go over the first minutes of accelerated heart beat and cold sweat try to come down and enjoy your own story. People are there to listen to you and they want you to ultimately do good.
That said, this is probably the hardest thing to achieve. Having a well structured presentation, with coherent content, nice slides and a lot of practice will get you closer to reach that sweet spot at presenting.
A few years ago I started envisioning how products with my artwork would look like. I did sketches, built some prototypes and busy by the everyday flow of work of my studio this idea ended up locked in my computer.
This year, my tiny tstudio team and myself worked extra hard to bring some of those products to life. We are excited to introduce Martina Flor Goods, a collection that aims to bring exquisite typography into beautiful and creative products. It ranges from paper goods to accessories, where every item is designed with care for detail and materials are meticulously selected.
We are thrilled to bring this collection to the world and we hope you’ll love it as much as we do ♥
Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.
About four months ago I received an invitation to speak at TEDx Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires. Being the largest series of talks in the world I immediately said yes. What I didn’t know is how introspective, transformative and exciting this whole process would turn out to be.
A TED talk is about conveying ONE IDEA and make others understand the world the way you see it. Gerry Garbulsky, TED Director for Spanish language and head of TEDx Río de la Plata told us at our first speaker meeting: think of this as "the talk of your life”. Personal involvement and perspective is what makes this talk unique and transforms the way others see things as well as the way you see what you do.
TEDx Río de la Plata is the biggest independently organised TED in the world. Is a one day event that hosts 10.000 people and the organisation take that challenge very serious. From the very beginning I was assigned two coaches: Adrián Kohan, a physic, teacher and consultant and Mariana Jasper an expert in corporate communication. After introducing what I do and how I do it they posed the first question that would make me think deeply about my work: why do you do what you do?. Answering this question and many others took weekly meetings throughout three months in which the presentation was shaped. Every word and image were carefully selected and polished. Mariana and Adrian’s commitment and professionalism were essential to deliver this talk.
Having the experience of giving presentations at design conferences about lettering and my work, this is nothing like I did before. Puting together a 15 minutes presentation pushes you to be precise with what you want to convey, the words and imagery you choose for that: whatever is not necessary becomes redundant.
The process that begun three months ago concluded last saturday in Buenos Aires. I had the honour to share the stage with many talented and outstanding professionals: scientists, physicists, journalists, musicians and artists from around the world. All of their talks were outstanding, enriching and moving. Additionally, facing a warm crowd of 10.000 people is definitely an image that will stay with me forever.
I come back to Berlin positively transformed by this experience and I’m curious for what’s to come. Thank you so much to all and every one at TEDx Río de la Plata: Adrián Kohan, Mariana Jasper, Gerry Garbulsky, Hache Ariel Merpert, Pau Coto, Jimena Jiterman, Maria Florencia Polimeni, Max Goldenberg, Melina Furman, Fer Salem, Pere Estupinya, Pablo Meyer Rojas, Pablo Lewin, Carolina Salamanca, Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Ary Nosovitzky, Santiago Bilinkis, Hernan Berdichevsky, Mai Canon, César Silveira, Mariano Feuer, Lucia Gagliardini, Silvan Kuperman, Sergio Feferovich, Luciano Melena, Sebastián Gomila, Carina Morillo, Gustavo Pomeranec, Christián Carman, Emiliano Chamorro, And all those I might be forgetting but that where an essential part of this.
Cuatro meses atrás fui convocada para dar una charla en TEDx Río de la Plata en Buenos Aires. Siendo la serie de charlas más importante y grande del mundo, no dudé en aceptar. Lo que no sabía es cuan introspectiva, transformadora y excitante iba a ser esta experiencia.
Una charla TED se trata de transmitir UNA IDEA y hacer que otros comprendan el mundo desde una nueva perspectiva: la propia. Gerry Garbulsky, Director de TED en Español y coordinador de TEDx Río de la Plata nos dijo en nuestra primera reunión de oradores: piensen en esta como "la charla de sus vidas”. Involucrarse personalmente es lo que hace esta charla única y transforma el modo en que otros ven las cosas y también la forma en que el orador ve su propio trabajo.
TEDx Río de la Plata es el evento TED organizado independientemente más grande del mundo. Es un evento de una jornada para una audiencia de 10.000 espectadores y la organización toma este desafío muy en serio. Desde el inicio me asignaron dos coach: Adrián Kohan, físico, docente y consultor, y Mariana Jasper, especialista en comunicación corporativa. Luego de contarles más en detalle acerca de lo que hacía y cómo lo hacía hicieron la primera pregunta que me haría pensar sobre el significado de lo que hago: ¿por qué te dedicás a esto?. Responder a esta y muchas otras preguntas fue un trabajo que involucró encuentros semanales a lo largo de tres meses en donde la presentación fue tomando forma. Cada palabra e imagen fue seleccionada cuidadosamente. El compromiso y profesionalismo de Mariana y Adrián fueron esenciales para dar esta charla.
Teniendo experiencia a dar charlas sobre lettering y mi trabajo en conferencias de diseño, esto no se compara con nada que haya hecho anteriormente. Preparar una presentación de apenas 15 minutos te empuja a ser preciso y cuidadoso con la selección de palabras e imágenes: todo lo que no es necesario está de más.
El proceso que empezó tres meses atrás concluyó este sábado en Buenos Aires. Tuve el honor de compartir escenario con otros destacados profesionales en su área: físicos, científicos, periodistas, músicos y artistas de todo el mundo. Todas sus charlas fueron excelentes, enriquecedoras y conmovedoras. Hablar delante de un público de 10.000 personas es una imagen que se va a quedar conmigo para siempre.
Vuelvo a Berlín positivamente transformada por esta experiencia y estoy curiosa de ver cómo esto repercute en otras cosas. Muchas, muchas gracias a todos y cada uno en TEDx Río de la Plata: Adrián Kohan, Mariana Jasper, Gerry Garbulsky, Hache Ariel Merpert, Pau Coto, Jimena Jiterman, Maria Florencia Polimeni, Max Goldenberg, Melina Furman, Fer Salem, Pere Estupinya, Pablo Meyer Rojas, Pablo Lewin, Carolina Salamanca, Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Ary Nosovitzky, Santiago Bilinkis, Hernan Berdichevsky, Mai Canon, César Silveira, Mariano Feuer, Lucia Gagliardini, Silvan Kuperman, Sergio Feferovich, Luciano Melena, Sebastián Gomila, Carina Morillo, Gustavo Pomeranec, Christián Carman, Emiliano Chamorro, y todos aquellos que puedo estar olvidando pero que fueron parte de esto.
La charla va a estar disponible online pronto. Suscribite a mi newsletter o seguime en twitter o instagram para poder avisarte.
After holding talks about my teaching methodology at TypeCon 2014 and AtypI 2014, defining the structure of my book turned out pretty easy. I remember coming back from the AtypI Barcelona Conference, driving directly from the airport to the studio, sitting at my desk and putting down on an A3 paper all the ideas that I had in my head. This was the plan de route for the book.
Left: first mind map of the content of my book in November 2014. Right: First pages plan of the book before finding a publisher.
I wanted to make a book that would speak to a broad readership under my personal belief that everyone can learn to draw letters. I also wanted it to feel as if the reader was at one of my workshops, with clear visual explanations. As a result, the book is 50% handmade, including sketches done by me, handwritten notes and schematic illustrations that explain in a didactic way how to draw letter shapes.
Since I defined the first structure for the content, I worked on it on and off aside my studio work. The growing amount of commercial work I was doing didn’t allow me to work on it on a daily basis and it wasn't until TYPO Berlin 2015 that I set a deadline for it.
SIGNING WITH A PUBLISHER
I met Bertram Schmidt-Friedrichs, the head editor from Verlag Hermann Schmidt, at Typo Berlin 2015. We were spontaneously introduced to each other by book designer Tomas Marauzkas. In a 5 minutes conversation I pitched the book I was working on and I believe that I spoke about it with such an enthusiasm and conviction that, some days after, Bertram invited me to Mainz to speak about the project.
Since they have a wide expertise on typography and design books, Verlag Hermann Schmidt seemed the right match for what I had in hands. I was after a publisher that would understand the sort of project I was after.
It took us a two hour meeting to realise that we were on the same page with the direction of the book. One month later we were signing the contract that 9 months after will bring to life this book.
DOING THE BOOK
My son was born a month after signing that contract with Verlag Hermann Schmidt. As every first-time mom, I had no idea of what it means to welcome a baby in your life nor how that influences your daily routine, your family and your work. The first months my son was there where truly challenging, enjoyable and confusing. I didn’t really know how I could ever go from that position to back to work again. However, I was sure of one thing: I wanted to make this book happen.
Funnily, the conditions turned out to be relatively positive to work on it. Since during those months I was taking in very few commercial commissions from clients, I could concentrate almost exclusively on this project.
Me working at my home office with baby
I was creating the content, the illustrations as well as taking care of the layout for most of the time and, therefore, the making of process turned out to be really toilsome. Having an engaged, open minded and straight forward editor coordinating the steps as well as giving me valuable feedback was essential to finalise the book.
The book was written in english and translated to german. Since a big part of it is composed by handmade sketches and handwritten notes, the process was time consuming as well as implementing the corrections.
Physical proof of designers hard work
THE RESULT
The book is much more than I initially imagined, and it was shaped through an exciting creative process with my editor as a partner. It concentrates on the process of drawing letter shapes by hand, i.e., the art of hand lettering. However, the goal is not to make imperfect, quirky, handmade-looking type, but rather to create well-shaped, polished, exquisite digital lettering.
To that end, I show the basics of letter design as well as essential tips to master different lettering styles.
I will guide you through the process of creating a lettering project, from start to finish, from analog to digital. Beginning your design by hand, you will learn about sketching methods and techniques to improve your drawings. Once you have finished sketching, you will jump into the digital environment and draw your letter shapes in vectors. You will finalize your piece by coloring it and adding texture. Last but not least, I will share some insights about the commercial work of hand lettering. I will describe the most common kinds of commissions and give advice on how to reach out for clients and how to showcase your work.
Before you run to your favorite book store to get your copy, you should know that this book shows just one way of doing things: mine. It is informed by my personal experience of working in the commercial world, by all the teachers and colleagues I learned from, and by my involvement in teaching at universities and private workshops.
My aim with it is to share all I have learned through trial and error. Rather than showing pretty alphabets that you can copy and color, this book will provide you with concepts, tools, and techniques that will guide you in your own path to hand lettering. Be ready to learn about them and make them your own. After reading this book, you will see letters in a totally new way.
Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.
I believe I’m one of these people with big career turn and moving to Berlin has a lot to do with that. I started to work exclusively as a letter designer more or less at the same time that I moved to the city. Working as a graphic designer and being an art director for 7 years I had of course been doing typography related stuff before. Still, it wasn’t until I moved here that I decided to stop doing any other graphic design work and pursued making a living exclusively from my lettering work.
My first step towards it was to clean up my website of all the things that I had done but I didn’t want to do anymore. My second step was to print new business cards. This was my way to say to the world that I was a letterer.
My first business cards as a letter designer
THE CONTEXT
Berlin is one of the cities with more type designers per square kilometre in the world. Berlin breaths typography: there’s monthly meetings (called Typostammtisch) where the typographic community comes together to discuss typography related topics, there’s a few conferences with a focus on the mater and there’s a vibrant community of designers working in the field. You can even find a museum of Letters (Buchstabenmuseum) that rescues abandoned vernacular signs from the streets from all around Germany.
Vernacular signs are all over the place in Berlin
Traditionally Germany has a focus on formal typography. Topics as readability, legibility and clarity are essential. And these are all things that my work doesn’t necessarily pursue. My work is colourful and expressive, at times is even not readable. It's about conveying an idea and telling a story. For this I use letter shapes that combined with color and texture create a new visual text.
I was truly hesitant whether this typographic community would accept my approach to letter design. Topping all my expectations, this community welcomed my work and ultimately triggered it. Throughout these years living and working in Berlin my work became more colourful, expressful and playful than i's ever been.
THE WORK
When started working commercialy with lettering I quickly realised that I had to improve my workflow. On the first place, to be able to manage multiple projects at the same time. On the second place, to cope with tight deadlines of agencies and publishing houses. My work process is moulded through that and has become more effective with the time.
Throughout this years I have parallel run a few side projects. The biggest one that I started was Lettering vs Calligraphy, where together with calligrapher Giuseppe Salerno we organised an online battle that got a lot of attention from the audience and the media. That was one of the most exciting times of my life. Also, the way this project improved my work showed me for the first time the impact that this sort of endeavours may have in your bulk of work and the sort of commissions you get.
The variety of letters we created together with Giuseppe Salerno.
Some years after that I started Letter Collections where I was designing and sending postcards to friends, colleagues and complete strangers. As a result, I created a collection of 100 postcards where I experimented with several lettering styles that informed my work immensely.
Side projects, commercial work and my teaching has been my main occupations during this years. Thanks to the growing attention towards my work, I have been regularly invited to speak at conferences.
THE TALKS
Speaking about my work and teaching has been one of the most nurturing things I have done so far in my career. It pushed me to organise my ideas, to question my methods and to identify what is important and what is not.
I have the luck to travel often to speak at design and type conferences, and it amazes me every time the fact that I share the stage with people I have admired since I was a young design student. Speaking about my work is just something I love to do and allows me to keep in mind the few things that are essential.
The title and the slides of my presentations about my experience at teaching lettering where made my hand.
TypeCon 2014 was the conference where for the first time I presented a talk exclusively focused on my teaching. I gave a similar talk at AtypI 2014. Breaking down my teaching method into a few clear simple steps that would fit in a 20 minutes presentation made me realise that I had an own personal method, that it was also didactic and certainly effective to achieve personal results. These talks, called after my online clases The Golden Secrets of Lettering first planted the idea of making a book about it in my head. And so I did.
Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.
The first lettering workshop I hosted was for free. I had just arrived to Berlin, fresh out of my type design studies in the Netherlands. No one really knew me in the city and I was positive that I could teach lettering, however I hadn't done it before and I wasn't sure if I was any good at it. My thought was basic and straight forward: if no one had to pay for it people would just sign up. That would give me more chances to have a room full and I would ultimately have the opportunity to try if I could do it.
I organized that workshop with a heart full of expectation. I planed every detail: how would I welcome the attendants, where would they seat, what would be the best for beverages and snacks and which goodies I would give away. I even organized an after workshop party, where the attendants could relax and fill in what I called The Wall of Letters, a wall-sized grid to fill with letters. After its completition it read "all the letters are equal".
The workshop exceded all my outlooks. The results were good, attendants were thankful and I felt that I had succeeded on trying to turn words something that I did intuitively. It was my first time at teaching letter design, but I felt that all the years of experience at teaching typography back in the years at Universidad de Buenos Aires translated into confidence and precision to convey concepts. That, jointly with my will to make it happen turned out to have a positive impact in my teaching.
Workshop organised in collaboration with Jakob Wolf
THE TEACHING METHOD
Over 5 years went through since that time. My first workshop lasted three days (three days!) and my workshops nowadays last 6 hours top. What has changed? My precision at sorting out the truly essential concepts that I want to give the people as take away. With the time I have also learned to identify profiles of students and how to help them improve their design process, so my efficacy at teaching translates into their success at working and getting the best out of the sessions within an economical process.
At these workshops I teach an effective technique to draw letters by hand very popular among letter designers: the improvement of a drawing by layers. Moreover, I convey a series of type design principles. Altogether these are the tools that they attendants could use for the continuation of their own practice. I also share insights on my experience at working commercially with lettering and I give tips on how to improve the workflow on a commission.
Demo of the sketching technique I use in my workshops
But perhaps the most relevant thing that I do with my teaching is to turn naive eyes into sharp, critical eyes at working with typography. And this is perhaps the most rewarding part of it, the feeling that attendants walk away with a degree of illumination. These students with my contribution will hopefully never look at letter shapes the same way again.
THE SERIES
I have taught over 35 workshops. Sometimes privately organised, at times in-house at agencies and publishing houses or universities.
I took my workshops to many cities. From the beginning I pursued the vision of turning them into an international series. And I did. I have hosted workshops in Barcelona, London, Buenos Aires, Turquey, Lugano, Dubai, Dessau and many other places in and outside Europe.
Picture with workshop attendants
The series of workshops became a living-the-dream experience that allowed me to travel to many countries as well as welcome more than 400 students eager to learn more about letter design.
However, this scheme was not sustainable. The amount of work and money invested into organising a workshop in another city began to undermine the concept of "international".
ONLINE SKILL SHARING
I quickly found out that my wish to reach new audiences was not possible to realise through face-to-face workshops. This is when online platforms like Domestika (in spanish) and Skillshare (in english) turned out to be great outlets for my endeavour.
Teaching my online skillshare class
They are a different experience than a face-to-face workshop: its affordable nature and the fact that you can structure your own content turns each class into a unique way of sharing the manner in which you do things. It also provides tools to create a community that is now over 12.000 students.
These years of teaching have translated into a community that comes back to me from time to time for showing me the last lettering they did for a poster or the hand lettered invitations for their own wedding. It is jut get to see how I contributed to their knowledge in some way.
My teaching at letter design started as a side project and is nowadays a big part of my work. And this experience all in all has helped me to build self confidence in what I do and allowed me to reflect on how I do it.
After intense years of work, I have published my first book on Letter Design called Lust auf Lettering published by Verlag Hermann Schmidt. The book will be released in English under its original name The Golden Secrets of Lettering in April 2017 by Princeton Architectural Press in the U.S. and Thames & Hudson in the U. K. The Spanish version will be published toward August 2017 by GG. Other languages will follow.
The book is the result of five years of teaching letter design as well as running a studio in custom typography and lettering. On account to all the effort, heart and brain that I put in this project I dare to say that this is a milestone in my work. As such, it sort of pushes me to look back in retrospective and try to join the dots that lead to this point of my career.
Within the upcoming week, I'll post a series of texts in this blog. They will cover my experience at giving workshops in letter design, my commercial work, my talks at conferences and, of course, the content of the book. Join me in this online celebration!
Find Lust auf Lettering in bookstores in all german speaking countries. You can order it online here.
Join thousands of readers in this community and upgrade your lettering skills! If you're as excited as I am, send this link to a friend, so they can subscribe too.
I'm thrilled to announce that my book is out in german language and you can pre-order it here. English and Spanish language publications will follow. Cheers to that!
