Gustavo Ferreira Appointed Director Of InfraStruction At FontStruct

Great news for users and fans of recently awarded online free font-building tool. Gustavo Ferreira is a designer specialised in digital type design and typography, but whose interests encompasses a variety of other areas that influence his design work in one way or another. He joins Rob Meek who will now be able to concentrate more on the inner workings of FontStruct, and on further improving the website. FontStruct users will have noticed Gustavo already took over the reins of most of support and communication, set up the FontStruct Twitter account, and he will soon introduce himself on Brick by Brick: News about FontStruct.

A native from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Gustavo Ferreira has lived in many other places (Brasília, Manaus, São Paulo, Cologne, Hamburg, Schwäbisch Gmünd, Den Haag). Living in different cultures taught him from an early age to look at things from many different angles simultaneously. He is fluent in Portuguese, English, and German, and is currently learning Dutch.

Tipografia Quântica| Presentation on type for digital screens and two case studies: the Elementar bitmap font system and Quantica, a TrueType-hinted outline font.

Senac-Lapa, São Paulo, Brazil, February 2007

Gustavo received a Bachelor degree in Graphic and Product Design at Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial – ESDI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a Masters degree in Communication, Planning and Design at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany , and another one in Type design and typography at Type&Media at the Royal Academy of Arts – KABK, The Hague, The Netherlands.

He has given type design workshops, and done presentations on free & open-source fonts, with details about the design of the custom type family for the University of Brasília (UnB) and its further development, the type-family Publica (Tipografia Pública); on type for digital screens, with two case studies: the Elementar bitmap font system and Quantica, a TrueType-hinted outline font (Tipografia Quântica); on an experiment in automating the Elementar Method, together with Frederik Berlaen at the RoboThon Conference, The Hague, April 2005 (Elementar Synthetic); and on a parametric bitmap font system designed to offer more typographic flexibility on digital screens at the ATypI Conference, Helsinki, September 2005 (Elementar, a flexible bitmap font system).

Elementar, a flexible bitmap font system| Presentation on Elementar, a parametric bitmap font system designed to offer more typographic flexibility on digital screens.

ATypI Conference, Helsinki, September 2005

During the last 5 years Gustavo has been developing a set of flexible type families – Elementar, Quantica, Publica, Mechanica, Geometrica, Amazonica, Synthetica and Jornalistica. He is currently finishing these families and preparing to launch his digital type foundry Hipertipo. His Elementar bitmap font system will be released through Typotheque. Besides his personal typographic projects Gustavo works on lettering, type design and font production jobs for specific clients. Gustavo currently lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Gustavo Ferreira's experience in modular bitmap type design and his Master degree in Type design and typography make him the ideal Director of InfraStructure for FontStruct. As he says himself:

In Grid We Trust.

Welcome, Gustavo.