Kontour Studio
Kontour is a design studio in Houston, Texas. It was founded by Sibylle Hagmann in 2000. Since its establishment, the studio was committed to projects for non-profit organizations—a concentration which arose less by chance and more by choice. The client base includes the arts sector, institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, MFAH; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Fisher Gallery of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; among others. The work produced in collaboration with this clientele are fine art catalogues, hardbound books and ephemera. It is the studio's philosophy to invest plenty of thought and care, no matter the size of the project.
Sibylle Hagmann's special interest lays in typography and its macrocosm of individual letterforms and glyph systems. Over the years she developed award winning typeface families, such as Cholla and Odile. Her fonts are distributed by the type foundry Emigre and the type co-op Village. Most type design projects are developed independently of commissions and sometimes find their way into client driven graphic design collaborations.
Hagmann has written for Sage Publications, Typographische Monatsblätter—Revue Suisse de l'Imprimerie—Swiss Typographic Magazine, IDEA magazine, and occasionally contributes indirectly to EYE articles.
Sibylle Hagmann
Sibylle Hagmann began her career in Switzerland after earning a B.F.A. from the Basel School of Design in 1989. She explored her passion for typography and type design while completing her M.F.A. at the California Institute of the Arts in 1996. Before relocating to Houston in 2000 she was the director of graphic design and publications for the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and taught at several southern Californian schools. In 1999 she completed the typeface family Cholla originally commissioned by Art Center College of Design and released by the digital type foundry Emigre in the same year. Cholla was among the winning entries of bukva:raz!, the type design competition of the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) in 2001. The typeface family Odile was released in 2006 and was awarded the Swiss Federal Design Award in the same year. Her work has been featured in several publications and recognized by the Type Directors Club of New York. She has presented her work nationally and internationally at typography conferences and educational institutions. Hagmann taught at several southern Californian schools (UCLA Extension, University of California - Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Art Center College of Design, Graphic Design Department, Pasadena, CA; USC Fisher Gallery, Museum Studies Master Program, USC, Los Angeles, CA) before moving to Houston, where she is an associate professor at the University of Houston, School of Art, Graphic Communications program since 2002.