A close up of the detail on Balog’s winning entry.
As we reported last week, the winner of the recent Rocking FontFont’s Free Fonts contest was Mladen Balog and his interpretation of Depeche Mode’s Violator album. We asked if Mladen would share a little about his experience with putting a entry together for the contest.
1) How did you pick FF Yokkmokk to use for the design?
Of the FontFonts eligible for the competition, FF Yokkmokk/Yakkmakk immediately stood out as the perfect fit for the album I had in mind. It has a warm, synth, electronic feel to it. You could say its idiosyncratic appearance makes it a ‘violator’.
2) How did you choose this album to rework?
There had already been a couple of great submissions to the Flickr pool like Kraftwerk, Blur, Radiohead (which got my vote) so the primary reason for entering the competition was curiosity. To see if the entry would create some kind of response, either positive or negative. The final result was a complete surprise.
The illustration was programmed in Processing. The program generates FF Yokkmokk’s v-i-o-l-a-t-o-r chars (more than 70,000 instances) at random positions, matching the colour of the original image at that precise x/y coordinate. The end result looks fuzzy so the source album had to be instantly recognizable to everyone. Being a Depeche Mode fan from the late ’80s, Anton Corbijn’s strong imagery for Violator seemed only natural.
3) How did you hear about the contest?
Through FontShop’s twitter feed and blog posts.
4) How long have you been visiting FontShop?
Right from the start. You guys have a ton of interesting articles about typography on your various sites. Yves Peters’ ‘ScreenFonts’ and ‘My Type of Music’ series are especially enjoyable. I first found out about FontShop way back in early nineties, after seeing your print ads in the German ‘PAGE’ magazine.
5) What are you going to scoop up with your grand prize?
FF Suhmo is outstanding, a rightful recipient of TDC’s Certificate of Excellence. Can’t wait to try it out in Processing. Thanks to FontShop for holding the competition and to everybody who voted.
Aaron’s June pick is 
