At the end of , just before my trip to Hungary, I had a nearly two-hour-long chat with Tatiana about type, life, privileges, collaboration, and El Salvador β things many of us take for granted. As more than a year has passed since our conversation, the interview ends with Tatiana sharing her experiences gained during the Type West postgraduate certificate programme in typeface design she started in January I would like to start by asking you about the ATypI Conference because this is where I heard about you and your work.
At the conference, you talked about vernacular type and showed plenty of examples of lettering that appear in everyday environments in El Salvador. Was there any other topic you were interested in, or did you know right away what topic you wanted to explore in your talk? I must say it was difficult to narrow it down. The talk was always about vernacular type, but, in the beginning, it was very much focused on the type seen on buses. For example, when I went to Slovenia on Erasmus, I could see that the buses were painted in one colour as the state runs the public transport system there.
In my country, everybody can buy a bus and start a line, and then paint the name of their daughter, son, lover, or something completely different on it. Some may prefer funny quotes. When you enter the bus, there's an explosion of colours within the vehicle. I would have loved to talk about it, too, but taking photos is one of the most difficult things to do because of safety issues.
I only got to know from a Colombian designer that in the past they had the same system, and the buses were painted similarly. Today the state runs the public transport system, so I do wonder what the future holds because things are changing in my country, too.
Who knows, maybe a few years from now the transport system will be nationalized and we will no longer see any of this type of work. The talk made me realize that some parts of our culture might get lost in the future. During your presentation, you also emphasized that designers and others need to rely on each other because of the situation in El Salvador.
