Siri Lee Lindskrog

Your background spans multiple cultural and educational contexts. How does this plurality influence the way you approach type design today?

At my studio (Formal Settings), we work across a broad range of outputs often within the visual arts and cultural field, where each project is shaped by distinct conceptual frameworks, whether a curatorial idea, an artist’s body of work, or the architectural and historical character of an institution. These contexts often become the starting point for new typefaces. Rather than developing type in isolation, my typographic ideas usually emerge from a specific project environment, allowing the typeface to evolve in response to its surrounding visual and cultural conditions. I think coming into type design with many years of experience as a type user, with a deepening and growing interest and engagement in fields such as art, philosophy and writing, makes me regard my type design projects from more perspectives than purely as a type creator.

In your projects, do you begin primarily with a formal necessity (a specific graphic question), or with a contextual one (use, commission, audience)?

It could be both depending on the context. At the core of our practice is a reciprocal relationship between type design and graphic design. We often investigate how type can carry meaning while also functioning as a primary visual element within a project. In those cases, a new typeface usually emerges from a formal or conceptual inquiry rather than from audience considerations. At other times—such as commissioned type projects like the one we developed for Sorel Footwear last year with Kasper Pyndt—the process is more directly shaped by communicative goals and brand identity.

In the article published on Eye on Design by the AIGA, you mention the idea that a “mistake” can become a structuring detail. At what point did you realize that something seemingly accidental could turn into a guiding principle?

I think that idea has been present for most of my time as a design practitioner. I’m quite controlled by nature, which might be why a project interests me the most when something slips slightly out of my hands. Form becomes engaging when it has that element of surprise or friction, something slightly unruly that resists total control. That tension often ends up giving the work its character. An old teacher framed it as "receiving a gift from the process”. Embracing friction and imperfection as a path to something new, basically.

How do you distinguish a “fertile mistake” from a simple imperfection that needs correction? Is there a threshold at which an accident becomes a system?

Time is usually the deciding factor. I have many finished designs that include forms which at first looked off or simply wrong to me, but that became more beautiful the longer I looked at them. I often need to sleep on it. Sometimes I wake up the next day and the form is still as ugly as before—then I know to let it go. Other times it has shifted somehow, and I start to see something in it that I hadn’t before. Then I get curious and keep exploring. It has become somewhat part of our method to try and push just beyond the point of control, before reining the process back in, organizing and curating the mess you just created. Very often the magic of a concept arises in the rough sketch phase and can so easily get killed by polishing, so then the task becomes to nurture and develop that magic imperfection to see what can grow from it, rather than correcting it.

Silvana Display seems particularly suited to demanding editorial or cultural contexts. Did you conceive it first as an expressive voice, or as a modular structure?

I see Silvana more as an expressive voice than a modular structure. It’s a very meticulously drawn typeface—each character has gone through many rounds of refinement to reach the right balance of expression and rhythm. Rather than following a strict system, the design evolved through a search for a certain tension and movement within the forms. A system as a guide and unifier but not a straight jacket. Imbuing Silvana with an organic aspect, alive through the juxtaposition of organised logic and individuality.

Silvana Text was released after the Display version, but can it truly be considered a simple extension? Would it be more accurate to view Silvana Display as a radical prototype — a space of experimentation where formal characteristics were deliberately pushed to their limits — in order to test their potential before seeking, with Silvana Text, a form of harmonization and stabilization for continuous reading? In other words, was the text version already embedded in the Display from the outset, or did it emerge later as a secondary necessity?

Silvana Text wasn’t embedded in the Display from the outset—it emerged out of a specific necessity. When my co-author Amanda-Li Kollberg and I were working on our book Notes on Book Design, the historical and simultaneously contemporary contexts we were engaging with, made us think that Silvana would be a great fit for setting the book, had it only been suitable for longer reading. And that’s the advantage of being the type designer yourself, you can create the version you need when the situation calls for it—so I did. 

If Silvana were to evolve into a larger superfamily, which directions would seem most relevant to you: additional optical sizes, contrasting styles, a more radical italic, a variable version?

I would probably play with widths—creating a condensed and expanded version? But as mentioned earlier, the seed to the next development inside an existing typeface or outset of a new one often comes from an outside context, as a relevant concept or a larger design brief - so we’ll see.

Today, what do you find most stimulating in type design: technology, historical research, editorial commissions, or personal experimentation? What are you currently working on that extends — or perhaps contradicts — the questions raised by Silvana?

A combination of historical research and personal experimentation. I’m interested in grounding my practice in history while still seeking the new. At the moment, I’m working on a new typeface in collaboration with Kasper Pyndt that’s rooted in Danish type design history. Like Silvana, its starting point was a historical specimen found in an archive, but while Silvana was more connected to the German tradition (the context I currently live and work in), my current project draws rather on my Danish heritage, and in that process also exploring and processing how Danishness has evolved and where Danish design is positioned in a larger context today.