#47 | RAMIRO ESPINOZA | AMSTERDAM’S TYPOGRAPHIC IDENTITY

Ramiro Espinoza has generously co-sponsored this season with his Retype foundry and we are happy to finally have him on stage at letterspace. With his research and revivals of vernacular lettering in Amsterdam he did a great service to the local design community that uses his digitized versions of letters originating from buildings and bridges. These typefaces are unique to Amsterdam and regularly find there way back into its environment. Ramiro has prepared a new lecture for letterspace, where he will share the cycle of his Amsterdam-based lettering journey.

—

Ramiro Espinoza studied graphic design in Santa Fe, Argentina. After graduation he taught Typography at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and worked as a typographer at newspapers. He specialized in type design at the KABK in The Hague and the Plantin Institute for Typography in Antwerp. He has been a contributor to design magazines, researched vernacular Dutch lettering and worked in numerous freelance assignments for FontShop International, Shinn Type and Feliciano Type Foundry. In 2007 he founded the Retype type foundry to market his own and the typefaces of his wider network.
—
Since visiting Amsterdam for the first time in 1993, Ramiro has been fascinated by the stylistic variety of that city’s vernacular letters. After moving from Argentina to the Netherlands in 2003 he was able to dedicate time to researching the various alphabets that dominate the Amsterdam typographic landscape. As a result of these explorations he created the fonts Kurversbrug (a revival of the brugletter alphabet), Krul (an interpretation of a popular pub lettering style) and Brinkhuis (based on a deco-styled alphabet employed in the Betondorp district). In his lecture Ramiro will explain how craftsmen’s alphabets can be rescued in a contemporary design context to genuinely represent local visual cultures and avoid producing identity projects that look anodyne or “manufactured”.
—
RSVP at eventbrite
—
Hosted at:
De Lange Adem
Ruyschstraat 295,
1091 DX Amsterdam
—

Supported by:

Retype Foundry & PICTORIGHT Fonds

Host or Publisher letterspace.amsterdam