“Hope is for losers.” Katja Schimmel interpreted the advice of her teacher Peter Verheul very clearly: she does not hope, she just gets on and does it.

She designs typefaces, develops tools and scripts, creates animations, practices lettering and calligraphy, and last but by no means least, Katja produces and masters fonts. She developed her font engineering skills intensively during her time with the specialists from Alphabet Type and more recently through working with Grilli Type.

One of her rather unusual talents is creating 3D installations. She once built a wooden construction at a festival, which was stimulated by a pulse sensor and reacted with light to the rhythm of the heartbeat of the visitors. In this and many other ways, she continually keeps herself open to new creative worlds in a multidisciplinary manner.

Katja has a Bachelor from the Weimar Bauhaus University as well as a TypeMedia Master in Type Design from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Before working with Loris Olivier and Noheul Lee on McQueen, she published her KABK graduation on the Future Fonts platform (Tweak Text and Tweak Display).