MTDBT2F4D by Dexter Sinister

In 2013, Dexter Sinister was commissioned to design a logotype for KADIST based on typography software they had recently designed called “Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font”. MTDBT2F was based on MetaFont, a very early digital font software developed by iconic computer scientist and Stanford professor Donald Knuth in 1979.

Both Knuth’s and the updated Dexter Sinister font software are “meta” in that they comprise a set of parameters that can be endlessly adjusted to generate fonts, resulting in an vast range of visual variations but based on the same skeleton alphabet. These parameters are similar to the usual qualities that make up families of fonts: weight, slant, and so on. For KADIST Dexter Sinister added a new paramater –*TIME*– to generate an animated version of the logotype that perpetually moved and changed each week, making slight (and random) shifts in the existing parameters. This version of the font software was designated Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font-4-D.

Established in the 2013 agreement was that the perpetually changing logotype would remain in use for 10 years: a custom piece of software embedded on www.kadist.kinsta.cloud, and downloaded periodically for use in KADIST materials in print and on screen. Over the following decade the typography changed each week, month and year—suggesting a process of evolution, growth, and development—as an alternative to the monolithic visual mark favored by corporations.

10 years later, with the logotype still in use, KADIST returned to Dexter Sinister with an invitation to reconsider the challenge of a visual identity, distilling the past ten years into a broader identity in line with the changes and developments at the organization. Since 2013, KADIST has become more established, its mandate more clearly articulated, and its identity more focused. Dexter Sinister proposed to mirror this through a more stable graphic identity derived from its wayward 10-year predecessor by establishing a ‘family’ of fonts, one for each year, with the 2020 font currently chosen as the ‘crystalization’ of the visual identity, and representation of the ten year process of evolution.