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Design and Identity between global types and local characters
April 24, 2014 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Boris Kochan’s branding agency KOCHAN & PARTNER is engaged in many fields of typography. Amongst others KOCHAN& PARTNER founded the Munich Typoday and exhibits the TDC-‐Show in their venues annually since 2004. Boris Kochan himself is founder and CEO of the agency, president of the Typographic Society Munich (tgm) and board member of the German Liaison Committee of the TDC. Since 2009, after a visit in Yerevan, Boris Kochan and his agency devote a lot of attention to the field of Non-‐Latin Typefaces.
Script carries the notion of yesterday, bringing it into today and tomorrow; script is cultural technique and cultural repository. The characters of written script are totally linked to the cultural memory of any society and form an integral part of its DNA. And while Latin scripts still dominate the global day-‐to-‐day life, the future lies in the diversity of local worlds of script.
The GRANSHAN project explores, melts, translates, connects … worlds of script, ways of communication, sign languages. With their focus on Non-‐Latin Typefaces, the GRANSHAN competition and conference are unique worldwide. Boris Kochan, designer, entrepreneur and one of the co-‐initiators of GRANSHAN, on the entire world of script in all its multicultural diversity … and on a collaborative adventure between time zones, strange misunderstandings and the power of signs.
Boris Kochan (*1962) is a corporate designer and entrepreneur, maker of books and publisher, consultant and managing partner of the design and communications agency, KOCHAN & PARTNER. Following his training in layout and typography, he gained professional experience in journalism at the German daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung, in the typesetting studio of Lothar Wolf and in the lithography department at Jürgen Höflich offset and screen printing. In 1981, Boris Kochan, together with friends, co-‐founded a studio for graphic design and text, adding the departments of setting and lithography just two years later. In 1989, ZELIG-‐DRUCK was added and in 1995, the interactive unit PEPPERMIND became part of the group. With more than 60 employees, KOCHAN & PARTNER is one of the ten largest owner-‐managed agencies for corporate design/corporate identity in Germany. Boris Kochan is chairman of the GRANSHAN competition for scripts and part of the jury of numerous competitions of typography and design such as Berliner Type. In April 2007, he was elected chairman of the Typographische Gesellschaft München, in June 2007 he was appointed to the German Committee of the Type Directors Club of New York and in 2011 he became a board member at iF Industrie Forum Design e.V..