Fourth edition of ColomboType was held on Sunday the 1st of July 2018 at 2.30pm onwards in Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, Colombo (1st Floor – Mahaweli Center).

The event included two of the much awaited workshops by Dr. Sumanthri Samarawickrama, senior lecturer at the Department of Integrated Design, University of Moratuwa, and Mahinda Bandara, lecturer at the Department of Visual Communication Design, Faculty of Visual Arts, University of Visual and Performing Arts.

Dr. Sumanthri Samarawickrama’s workshop was named “Play with display”. Her session started off with a presentation on early styles of Sinhala display typefaces. She explained in her presentation how each typeface had ‘played’ with the anatomy of the basic letter in order to give birth to a new style. All the participants were then given the chance to play on their own, redraw a letter of their choosing in a style that was shown in the presentation. This novel experience of playing with anotomy of letters opened up new perspectives of looking at display type for the participants.

Experiencing Calligraphy (ආධුනිකයින්ට කැලිග්‍රැෆි හුරුව) workshop by Mr. Mahinda Bandara also kept the hype up for the rest of the day. As the name suggested, it was all about ‘experiencing’. Mahinda, first explained the tools and rules of calligraphy and with the materials provided, it was time for the participants to have fun and be creative. The workshop was, for most, their first time doing calligraphy.

At the end of Colombo Type #004, all the participants gathered around for a picture with their display type creations and calligraphy attempts from the workshops.