Luise Schröder founded a private business school in 1910 in Stettin, a city once part of Germany. With a focus on typewriting and stenography, she was a local educator of modern communication. Her family was impacted by global technological developments and socio-political shifts throughout four generations.
The common use of blackletter typefaces ceased, and Roman letterforms became predominant, as in other countries in Europe. In today’s digitised world, typing is considered intuitive and doesn’t require professional educators anymore.
I Never Learned to Type with Ten Fingers compiles stories from inside a family-run school. It delves into the past century of typography, through personal and corporate documents. Family pictures, letterheads, graphic prints, signs, and newspaper articles provide insight into a particular corporate identity. In dialogue with this visual research, a font family was designed dedicated to the characters of the school. The typefaces are hybrids between the past, present, and future, and they investigate phenomena such as monospace, italic, and ligatures. In the accompanying publication, they give voice to personal anecdotes and speculative stories about family and typography.
