Description:

AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) is an international association of the world’s leading designers, with more than 500 members from 46 countries. Founded in 1952, it is a not-for-profit organisation focused on connecting leaders of the global design industry and giving back to local creative communities.

AGI members including Josef Müller-Brockmann, Kenya Hara, Margaret Calvert, Massimo Vignelli, Paul Rand and Paula Scher—to name just a few—have been pivotal in shaping what we know as visual culture today.

Each year, AGI holds an Open Conference for the public and a Congress for Members in a different global city. In 2023, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland was the host city for the first time.

To give shape and structure to the event, we established a theme of kōrero—which represented our ambition to connect and create conversations between disciplines, generations and cultures, and to inspire local communities about the possibilities of design.

To kōrero is the essence of what AGI is about as an organisation.

As such, we wanted language to play a central role in our communication design. We wanted to take the immediacy of speech and create a process to transform it into a graphic expression that would give AGI Aotearoa a distinct visual voice through all communications.

The result was the AGI Typewriter, which was developed to render letters within a strict geometry of triangles and circles—the components of the AGI logo mark.

Each letter is generated procedurally every time it’s typed—meaning no two letters are the same. It is used to create unique typographic patterns and graphic elements, with each word, sentence or paragraph a new composition.

The individual shapes are affected by physics, bouncing onto the screen, colliding with each other and falling with gravity to create a sense of vibration and timbre.

The AGI Aotearoa Typer was used in all major communications, from social ads and digital billboards to printed ephemera.

It was also the voice of the event—a medium for beaming a continuous live-stream of questions, quips and comments to the big screen on stage, enabling the conference audience to kōrero with speakers in real-time.

From a functional perspective, the typewriter program allowed us to dictate the screen size, physics effect, shapes used and kinds of output. Rendered as either vector shapes or video, it provided an animated element to our communications.

In motion, the typography could shout, whisper or sing. Like a spoken word giving way to silence, the words existed momentarily before disintegrating into a jumble of geometric forms.

The typewriter enabled us to seamlessly communicate in physical and digital spaces, in large and small scale, static and live on-stage.