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Janno Hahn www.jannohahn.nl

Forum Groningen – Library

By 08-05-2020

Janno Hahn is a typographic designer who uses only his own fonts in his work. Sometimes he uses a font that was already in the pipeline and is suitable but usually he designs unique fonts for specific projects. This expertise gives him the opportunity to design fonts that respond to the properties of materials and techniques and the possibilities and challenges that the various projects bring with them.

When the architects collective deMunnik-deJong-Steinhauser asked him to do ‘something sweet’ with a poem by Simon van Wattum and to make a typographical work for the walls of the silent spaces in the library of a new public building in Groningen, he gladly accepted the assignments because they were to his heart’s delight.

As every strophe of the poem in the  Groningen dialect begins with ‘I write poetry’, it turns into a kind of ode to poetry. Hahn gave it the shape of a large letter board with loose brass letter plates as an ode to typography without doing the poem enormous violence. For this poem he made a monospace version of one of his fonts called the Riso.

For the walls of the silence spaces that would be covered with acoustic panels, he made a typographical work called: You Have The Right To Remain Silent. Because the panels would be perforated, he designed a font that takes this intervention into account and only consists of short straight lines. This intervention ensures that there are no loose letter shapes that need to be assembled at a later stage and it also allows the whole text to become more of a pattern.

The building that opened its doors at the end of 2019 was designed by NL. Architects and the public spaces in the building were designed by deMunnik-deJong-Steinhauserarchitects collective.

More Janno Hahn > 05.07.2016