Kai Bernau.
Design for readers.
Hi, my name is Kai. In 2005 my partner Susana Carvalho and I co-founded Carvalho Bernau. We design publications, identities, typefaces etc. After 18 years in The Hague, we moved to Porto in 2021.
Contact me
Yes please, get in touch: contact@kaibernau.com, +351 91 402 30 54. You should definitely follow me/the studio on Mastodon: đ @carvalho_bernau@typo.social or on Instagram: đž @carvalho_bernau.
Retail type
With Susana (and a bunch of helpers), I designed a typeface family called Algebra that was released in 2016 with Commercial Type.
Together with Christian Schwartz, we developed Atlas Grotesk and Typewriter, see http://carvalho-bernau.com/atlas/ in 2012. It too is available from Commercial Type. (This text is set in Atlas Typewriter, for example)
I designed the Lyon font family in 2009/2010 and itâs available from Commercial Type. More info on the atelierâs website.
Lyonâs news-oriented headline sibling Lyon Hed, originally commissioned by Mark Porter for Internazionale (see below) has been released in 2021 at the Commercial Type Vault. Lyon Hed has been designed with help from Robin Mientjes.
My typeface Neutral has been majorly reworked from the original project (back in 2005) and is available from Typotheque since 2014.
Custom type
With Carvalho Bernau, we have been making custom typefaces for projects and clients big and small â for identity projects like Amsterdamâs Sandberg Institute or type-as-a-subscription-model for Esquire UKâs Big Black Book (art direction by David McKendrick).
We also designed a complex interface type system for HBO, together with Erik van Blokland, and later language extensions with Ilya Ruderman and Irene Vlachou.
We made many projects for Internazionale: The masthead/logotype, a stencil typeface, and a comprehensive newspaper headline family; they were all art directed by Mark Porter.
There are others, from publications to corporations â too many to list here. You should hire us for custom type projects, too!
Teaching
Since 2011 I am a professor for type design (and sometimes publication design) at the MATD Master programme in Type Direction at Ăcal, Lausanne. I wrote a about my first semester course Tools Make Shapes for the website of Ecal Typefaces, and gave a lecture at the 2023 ATypI conference.
With my colleagues at Ăcal, we did research into alternatives to the dominant paradigms in type design, that is to say outline-based BĂ©zier drawing. The results are puiblished at Beyond BĂ©zier, where you can watch or read the lecture I gave at our symposium late 2024.
In 2019/2020, the course director Matthieu Cortat and I supervised Shuhui Shiâs AIZI/AIć/ç±ć post-master research project on Artificial Intelligence for Chinese Type Design. One of the projectâs outcomes is a free and open source database of Hanzi cahracter composition. Following a presentation of the project at ATypI Tech Talks 2021 (not accessible), I wrote an article about AI in type design called GAN and GANât for the project website.
In 2014/2015, I was a visiting professor in Wigger Biermaâs Typo-Grafik course at HfbK Hamburg.