It is not that often I get the chance to meet a fellow Armenian designer, so I was excited when Gor Jihanian, a current student of MA Typeface Design (MATD) at the University of Reading (UK) was in Belgium for a few days. Luckily he had no appointments on Saturday so he came over to Gent, to visit the MIAT museum and follow the workshop carefully planned by Stéphane De Schrevel (and assisted by me).
Gor Jihanian who was born in Armenia but spent most of his life in USA where he graduated as an architect from the University of Colorado Boulder, always had a passion for typography. While working on a various publication and finding out how few decent Armenian fonts actually existed he decided to enrol in University of Reading (UK) to follow typeface design course. I have seen a few sketches and tests of the typeface(s) Gor is working on and I quite liked it. So I'm curious to see the final results.
After a short introduction and a little tour through the drawers of wood types available at the museum, the actual work was started. As the 8th of March (international women's day) was approaching Gor came up with a lovely idea of making a poster celebrating the women's day and typesetting it in Armenian (well in transcription of course). It was quite interesting how Gor, a child of digital age, approached the typesetting process and how the design has been evolving through the 4-hour workshop. Well, as we all know, no CTRL+Z is possible when typesetting by hand:) But I thought it went quite well and we all enjoyed the process. It was nice meeting you Gor!
