About

Hello. I’m Adam. Nice to meet you. No, really. I mean, it’s good that you’re reading this. I once heard that only one out of ten users is curious enough to read these “About” pages. Now you’re that one. Congrats. You’ve earned a free beer. (Just kidding. Nothing is free.) OK. Seriously.

Maybe a few words about myself and all this insanity. I started out as a math teacher at a high school. (No, don’t stop reading, I’m serious.) After graduating from high school, I went to Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, to the Faculty of Science. It was a great time. Differential equations, vector spaces, and beer. You know, the usual stuff. Don’t tell me it was completely different when you were at Harvard. After teaching in high school for three years, I quit.

That was in the late ’90s, the early days of the web, and everyone around me was somehow putting a website together. So I caught the HTML, JS, CSS, PHP, XML, and almost-all-the-other-three- or four-letter-abbreviation bug. Soon I found myself in a graphic design studio coding ActionScript from five to nine. (Yes, that was the time when I woke up late and went to bed early. At the studio.)

You remember it: the age of full-Flash websites, animations, and those damned intro pages where you entered a steampunk room with techno loops and an audio-off button in the tiniest font size ever. And banners. Lots of banners. So I spent those years there, and later at another job, where I created interactive educational materials.

Still, from time to time, I found myself getting more and more interested in graphic design. (Not a surprise. My mother, my brother, and even his wife are art historians.) So much so that when I first read Simon Loxley’s Type: The Secret History of Letters, I suddenly realized that this was my life. I wanted to study typography. Right then. The problem was that I didn’t know where it was taught, how much it cost, how the schedule would affect my working hours, or whether I was too old for another degree at all. (At 35.)

It turned out I wasn’t. After two and a half years at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, I earned my Chartered Typographer degree. I was happy in a way I’d almost never been before. (And I have to say a huge thank-you to all my teachers, but especially to our class leader, Péter Maczó, whose open-minded attitude tolerated my unbearable interpretation of time.)

Now, if you’re still reading, you may ask, “OK, but how does coding lead to typography?” Well, quite simply. The years of my first degree had their effect: they changed the way I see the world. The strict, hierarchical, accurate, and logical structure of a mathematical question and proof is not so different from a typographic problem.

Typography is as much an art as it is a craft. (It’s no accident that William Morris, one of my favorite figures in typography, was a leader of the Arts and Crafts movement.) You have to be consistent when designing a page, a business card, an identity, anything. Mathematics was a good starting point for that.

And as for generative art: that’s an old favorite too. I’ve always loved computationally produced images, so generative art is an ideal meeting point between my coding knowledge and my affinity for graphic design. I like the way pixels can be generated randomly from a few lines of code.

That’s the reason for the many experiments across such a wide range of applications: each one has its own universe. And I love floating through this space. So, that’s me. Your typographic rabbit, algorithmically speaking. At your service. Thanks for reading. See you later.