Munken Creator. Impetuous typographic experimentation – inspiration beyond boundaries. A typographic playground of creative possibilities, enabling designers to create visually animated and unique messages. An initiative to inspire cooperation and challenge how we reinvent creative tools for a hybrid future.

Two years ago famed Swedish paper brand Munken developed a new font which they subsequently made available for everyone to use: Munken Sans – a timeless font, inspired by 1960’s Swedish typeface Tratex.

After the release, I was approached by agency JUNO to ideate and develop a novel playground for this font which would allow creatives to explore its application in surprising new ways. They specifically asked for a solution that would fuse the unexpectedness of Creative Coding- and Generative Design-based visual exploration with precise control over the font’s properties. The result of our dialogue is The Munken Creator: A playground of unimagined possibilities, enabling designers to create visually animated and unique messages. It is an invitation to inspire cooperation among creatives. And a challenge of how we preserve the heritage of design while simultaneously reinventing its tools for a hybrid future.

Client

Arctic Paper / Munken Paper

Agency

JUNO Hamburg

My roles

Concept & design of the design system Development of the design system Generative Typographic Design Programming and technical implementation of the entire project Consulting

Formats

Interactive design tool Magazine printed on Munken paper Web experience Social media graphics

Artworks created with the Munken Creator can be saved as print-ready, super high resolution image files and even animated videos. You are free to use your work for all personal projects. Create book projects, brand work, kinetic typography animations or project your creations on the walls of a house. There are almost no limits.

The question of how our heritage and culture as designers can be both preserved and re-invented simultaneously is an incredibly fascinating challenge. In this context, I am particularly drawn to exploring how the machine can be both understood and utilised as an equal partner in the creative process.

By encoding typographic opportunities into an algorithm, creatives are confronted with a new mindset of how to approach form, space and storytelling. The Munken Creator is specifically designed to inspire novel encounters with typography. It is a playful and reactive space to explore shape, form and space using Generative Design– and Creative Coding-based systems.

colab.munken.com/munkencreator

We open our senses to new opportunities when we ask appropriate questions – a process that should be open to everyone. Thus, the Munken Creator can be accessed on any device by simply visiting a website, no need for downloads or licenses.

Share your creations seamlessly with other creatives and between devices. Every setting, value and idea can be anonymously exchanged simply by sharing the URL of your creation – start a creative conversation with your circle. The Munken Creator invites creatives around the globe to explore their own questions and share them via social media using the hashtag #munkencreator.

The Munken Creator allows for endless creative possibilities as images and backgrounds can be combined with font editing capabilities and the power of Creative Coding-based algorithmic animation in a real-time, reactive environment. Create animations, brand graphics, kinetic animations – there are no limits.

Questions lead to new answers for our times. To start the conversation, Munken launched the Raising Questions magazine featuring large-format, curated artworks designed with the Munken Creator.

The magazine bridges the physical and digital worlds by incorporating an augmented reality (AR) experience for each artwork. The magazine is aimed at inspiring people to think beyond the boundaries of how we communicate. By fusing augmented reality technology with Generative Design and Creative Coding, the digital creative platform enables a new dimension of perception.

The Munken Generator bridges the gap between physical and digital, between concise human control and letting the computer take over. It creates fleeting, ever-changing fragments of design and captures special moments to be preserved forever on Arctic paper.

In that regard, it is a playground of possibilities and an outlook on the creative potential of Generative Design, which fuses storytelling and communication design with creative algorithms, data, human interaction and programming in a melting pot of new opportunities.

Artworks created with the Munken Creator can be saved as print-ready, super high resolution image files and even animated videos. You are free to use your work for all personal projects. Create book projects, brand work, kinetic typography animations or project your creations on the walls of a house. There are almost no limits.