Join us for a talk by designer Carolyn Porter about creative curiosity, the importance of passion projects, and the remarkable story behind the bundle of letters that inspired the design of her typeface P22 Marcel Script.
During the depths of World War II, Frenchman Marcel Heuzé mailed letters to his wife and three young daughters from a labor camp in Berlin. His beautiful looping cursive carried tender words of love along with testimony about day-to-day survival inside the camp. Sixty years later, type designer Carolyn Porter found his letters at an antique store in Stillwater, Minnesota and began to transform Marcel’s handwriting into a modern computer font. After having his letters translated, she became obsessed with finding answers to the questions: Who was Marcel? Why had he been imprisoned in Germany? Why were his precious letters for sale halfway around the world? And most importantly: Did Marcel survive?
