Type Tasting

Just now.
The smell of first rain on a hot, sunny day.
This is a time machine to memories gone by.

On the hot London pavement it took me back to childhood and collecting wooden lolly sticks walking home from school towards the end of that long hot summer.

The drops landing on the hot ground have a very distinctive aroma.
It’s called petrichor.

Compounds from the ground are trapped as tiny air bubbles when the first raindrops land. These bounce upwards and burst right under our noses, like bubbles of champagne.

I created a prototype installation called Proustian Rain. Chatting to people I discovered that, while we all recognise the smell of petrichor, it’s different depending on where we are. For me this is pavement and tarmac. For someone else it’s rainforest vegetation.

That made sense once I read that that the main compounds (geosmin and 2-MIB) get mixed with local elements. This makes the aroma distinctively recogniseable and different because the cocktail of elements varies from place to place.

A smell that’s simultaneously universal and uniquely local.

Ten years ago, I accidentally wrote a bestselling book.

“Nobody will be interested” they said. So I self-published. The book was picked up by Penguin within six months.

I didn’t set out to write a book, but the one I wanted to read didn’t exist yet.

The book is Why Fonts Matter.
It’s packed with results of the mass-participation experiments I’d been running at big events since 2013.
Along with experiments for you to try out on yourself.

The book has helped to change the conversation about typography. It had been stuck in academic language for a really long time. Yet, I experience it through all the senses. I found out that you do too: how perfume smells different depending on the typeface, what type of chocolate a font would be, and how it can even make a jellybean sweeter.

At the start people thought what I was doing was weird.

Ten years on, I know things have shifted because conversations about the flavour, smell and sound of fonts are everywhere.

Now I’m doing it again…

Seeing Senses expands the work beyond typography, into how sight triggers expectation, emotion, memory and behaviour across all the senses.

We’ve designed visually for so long that we’ve forgotten how to design with all the senses working together.

What book do you want to read that doesn’t exist yet?

(Portrait by my niece Clara, also 10 years old cc ).

Which popcorn would you choose?
Would one taste better than the other?

Move over Calibri vs Times New Roman. This is a new font duel.

I’m just heading out to run a fun workshop on multi-sensory perception through the lens of fashion, with students visiting London from the US.

It’s going to be a fun roller coaster of activities, games and challenges.

I’ll report back...

(Font duel: Comic Sans vs Didot)