The talk focused on Josefina and Sue’s experience of applying the research findings and the design approach to a set of documents explaining how to use a test for viral flu. The team developed a toolkit to support the creation of point-of-use instructions, taking account of views from diagnostic industry members to inform an understanding of how instructions are produced currently and what guidance might be helpful.
Plus, the IIID award ceremony closed the conference, and Josefina won an award in the Healthcare category for her work with CwPAMS on their Antimicrobial Stewardship Toolkit. Congratulations to Josefina!
Healthcare was the theme for the 2023 IIID Vision Plus Conference, held in the Design Forum in Vienna. Rachel and Josefina gave a joint talk about their ongoing work looking at documents from the Forms Information Centre Collection held at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. The documents were produced by the British government in the 1970s–80s to guide citizens in navigating public services. These services included claiming benefits, accessing healthcare, supporting disabilities, and help for those with caring responsibilities.
Presenting at the conference was a good opportunity to share examples of healthcare-related documents that are held in this unique collection. They shared a brief timeline of what was happening during the time that these documents were being produced. They then shared examples of document design that were of particular interest during their initial work. These include how symbols, pictograms, and illustrations were used to communicate healthcare topics, and how colour and layout helped people understand their options and take steps to access public services.
Sue Walker and Josefina Bravo have produced guidance in the form of a toolkit and a dataset for the design of instructions to support home and community diagnostic testing. This derived from the AHRC-funded Covid Rapid Response project ‘Information Design for Diagnostics: Ensuring Confidence and Accuracy for Home Sampling and Home Testing’. The work was also support by funding from the University of Reading’s Rapid Response Policy Engagement funding from Research England, which enabled consultation with research users and implementors of the toolkit.
The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users.
User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests provides evidence-based guidance and tools for manufacturers of tests, service providers and content and design specialists who produce instructions to accompany diagnostic tests for home and community use.
The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users. A related data set includes templates and illustrations for download and use.
The resource includes templates and illustrations for download and use
This July, Rachel Warner and Emily Allbon presented their project ‘Freeing Liberty through information design’ at the International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication (ICTVC). Their project focuses on designing information on our civil liberties, provided by Liberty. Liberty gave Rachel and Emily a challenge: to identify how information design might help to make their online legal information advice more accessible, useful, and understandable. At the conference, initial ideas were presented for information on:
Stop and search – a downloadable online checklist to use when faced with a stop and search event
Police complaints – a flowchart that aims to communicate the steps and roles involved in the police complaint process
Immigration – the use of illustrations to accompany text to acknowledges experiences and emotions
The project continues to develop, with future plans for workshops with information users, legal experts, and advisors. So, watch this space!
Design process: sketching out the police complaints process
Initial ideas: draft solution for stop and search information
This exhibition, now open in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, explores the concept of the male gaze in twentieth-century British illustration, and is curated by Cătălina Zlotea.
The exhibition analyses the work of the British illustrator, Charles Mozley (1914–1991), through a contemporary lens. It does so by foregrounding two female stereotypes depicted in advertisements, ephemera, and fine art lithographs made by Mozley between the late 1940s and the early 1980s. The exhibition arrangement creates contrast and conflict between the image of the middle-class “virtuous” woman – a virgin goddess placed on a pedestal – and the “loose” woman – an anonymous sex object signalled through hair colour and scanty clothing. This female presence, recurrent in Mozley’s work, demonstrates the quality of the artist’s draughtsmanship while connoting middle-class masculine virtues, follies, and sexual desires.
The exhibition is open weekdays, 10 am to 5 pm. Closed bank holidays.
About Charles Mozley
Charles Mozley was born in Sheffield where he studied painting and drawing at the Sheffield College of Arts and Crafts. In 1933 he won a scholarship from the Royal College of Art and moved to London to study painting. After graduating, he taught life drawing, anatomy, and lithography at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Following the Second World War and for the rest of his career, he worked as a freelance artist.
Prolific and versatile, Mozley was among the artists commissioned by Frank Pick and Jack Beddington for prestigious London Transport and Shell-Mex advertising campaigns. He also created designs for the advertising agency Colman, Prentis & Varley, for theatre and film production companies, and for many British publishers. He painted a mural for the Festival of Britain, contributed to the popular “School Prints” and “Lyons Lithographs” series, and produced ephemera for restaurants and the wine trade. Alongside commercial work, Mozley continuously painted, made prints, and exhibited in solo and group shows.
The long list of commissions, as well as the works held by the Charles Mozley Trust, provide evidence that Mozley’s pictures were widely seen in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. As Nicolas Barker has remarked, Mozley’s work is “a graphic-mirror of the post-war era”, making it a valuable resource for the study of visual culture.
Credits
Curator: Cătălina Zlotea
Exhibition design: Cătălina Zlotea, Hannah Smith
Exhibition consultant: Eric Kindel
Archive consultant: Sallie Morris Production: Geoff Wyeth
Thanks to the Charles Mozley Trust, which has supported this exhibition and the doctoral research by Cătălina Zlotea that informs it.
Installation
Selected works by Charles Mozley highlighting key projects.Overview of the exhibition space contrasting the “loose” woman and the “virtuous” woman, as subjected to the male gaze.Illustrations by Mozley depicting the “loose” woman.Illustrations by Mozley depicting the “virtuous” woman.
Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012, an exhibition in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication surveying the experimental graphic practice of the American designer, Ed Fella.
We are holding a one-day symposium on Saturday 13 July, where world-class experts in design research, teaching, and practice will discuss ways of positioning ephemera within graphic design and typeface design. Participants will experience the visual richness of printed ephemera through illustrated talks and hands-on sessions with material from our collections of ephemera.
Hands-on sessions will be conducted by Martin Andrews, Paul Luna, Lucienne Roberts, and Michael Twyman. Talks will be given by Rathna Ramanathan and Fred Smeijers. (For past students and attendees of our events, the sessions will include material that has not been viewed before in any of the regular in-term sessions.)
The Symposium will begin at 10:00 in the Department of Typography, and conclude at 17:30. Lunch will be provided in the Meadow Suite. The event is capped to 60 participants to enable close access to the material, discussion and networking.
Congratulations to postgraduate researcher Bodil Mostad Olsen who has won the University’s prize for research communication in a poster competition, held as part of the University’s annual Doctoral Research Conference. Bodil’s communication of her research topic – the history of health communication on food labels – was judged top among a very competitive field of posters representing research across a wide range of arts, science and social science disciplines. Her poster illustrates her collections-based research. It shows the changing influences of scientific understanding of food hygiene and nutrition, food packaging technology, and societal change on the presentation of food to consumers from 1850–1970. This area of typographic and graphic communication practice, although influential in people’s everyday decision-making, has not been considered previously from this wide, contextual perspective.
Design process: sketching out the police complaints process
Initial ideas: draft solution for stop and search information
