All fonts look the same

All fonts look the same is an Exhibition of 260 fonts, celebrating uniquely restricted shapes with an almost endless amount of variation.

On October 12th 2018, my group exhibition had its opening night at 45 Courtenay Place. It was the output of an exhibition paper that I took during my 4th and final year of study at Massey University. Myself and four others worked for a full semester, conceptualising, developing and curating this unique exhibition experience.

Our aim for this exhibition was to give typography a voice within gallery contexts, as it is an often overlooked art form. We wanted to show appreciation towards the designers who crafted each typeface as well as inform the general public of various typography terminology.   

A big part of the exhibition process was contacting every type foundry whose typefaces we chose to exhibit. This proved to be an enormous amount of admin work with 100s of emails sent back and forth between us and foundries all over the world. Thankfully almost every foundry we contacted were really excited to have their work on display, and even allowed us to use their typefaces at no cost. Because we reached out to so many international foundries, our exhibition gained a lot of overseas recognition, with the website being shared across multiple graphic design blogs. It also meant our facebook event gathered a following of 700 or so people. This made us anxious going into the opening night as we had no idea what sort of numbers to expect.

Leading up to our exhibition opening, we were worried that people would see our exhibition at a surface level. What we were met with on opening night was quite the opposite and really surprised us. The level of engagement with the typefaces was amazing and more than we could have hoped for. Throughout the night people were photographing letters, noting down typefaces and engaging in deep discussions on their new appreciation of the letter Z and why they will never look at it the same way again.

Overall it was an awesome experience and a great end to my uni career.

Check out the exhibition website here:
http://allfontslookthesame.com/