Our department has a history of putting users at the centre of the design process. James Lloyd has been speaking to school leavers about what this means in terms of the kind of people we're looking for when we review their applications.
Category: staff
Armchair travel: exploring Central Asia in books
An exhibition of books about exploring, trekking and travelling in Central Asia, next to the Reading Room.
Fiona Ross at Type Drives Culture
The NYC-based Type Directors Club will hold a one-day conference with the theme 'Type: More _ than Ever' to celebrate the importance of type and typography in global culture. The keynote speaker for the event will be Fiona Ross, who is also a TDC Medal recipient.
Paul Luna: a very short introduction to typography
'It's not all about fonts!' At a special Baseline Shift session, our former Head of Department stressed the importance of design for reading.
Facing the world
'Facing the World: Towards a Global History of Non-Latin Type Design' is a special issue of Philological Encounters, edited by Thomas S. Mullaney of Stanford University, and published by Brill.
Research introductions
Alison Black, Jeanne Louise Moys, Sue Walker, Gerry Leonidas and Eric Kindel showcased a range of research projects, past and present, to give Part 1 students an insight into the current state of design research.
Chinese publishing collaboration proceeds
The inaugural symposium of the Creative Chinese Character Industry took place at the Beijing Convention Center on 3 and 4 November. The symposium brought together speakers from different areas of research and professional practice relating to the Chinese script: linguistics, Sinology, typeface design, publishing, and calligraphy. The symposium concluded with the preparatory work for the founding of the Chinese Character League, an interdisciplinary body bringing together organisations and agencies, including the Chinese Character Museum in Anyang.
In addition to speaking at the Symposium and being invited to act as guide for the CCL, Gerry Leonidas had the opportunity to update plans for a project, supported by the University of Reading and ATypI, of publishing key typography texts in Chinese. The first title in the series, Jan Middendorp’s Shaping Text, is nearly out of print already; below, Gerry holds the proof edition of the second title, How to create typefaces by Cristobal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer, and José Scaglione. The series extends to twelve titles, with a schedule of publishing two titles per year.
One letter at a time
Vaibhav Singh's exhibition on non-keyboard ‘index’ typewriters ran in the Department in late 2018. Check out all the details at Contextual Alternate.
Fiona Ross awarded the TDC Medal
The New York-based TDC announced that Professor Fiona Ross, a long-standing member of staff in the Department and Curator of the Non-Latin Collections, will be the thirty first person to receive the prestigious TDC Medal. Fiona joins an illustrious list of past recipients which include David Berlow, Colin Brignall, Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, Gerrit Noordzij, Paula Scher, Erik Spiekermann, and last year our colleague Gerard Unger.
Fiona began her career in type in 1978 working at Linotype, where she rose to lead the non-Latin department as the company’s first female manager. She has been responsible for the design of many typefaces for South Asian scripts that have become the standards for reading matter, and sources for numerous imitations. Her work began with typefaces for newspapers, and nowadays extends to the full range of font resources for text typography, from typefaces for online documents to user interfaces, to webfonts. Notable recent projects include her contribution to the typefaces for the Murty Classical Library of India series by Harvard University Press, the Bengali typefaces for the Anandabazar Patrika (ABP), and the Arabic Markazi Text.
Central to Fiona’s contribution is her ongoing research, and her engagement in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. Fiona is a key staff member for our MA Typeface Design programme and TDi summer course, a contributor to the MARes Typography & Graphic Communication and the MRes Typeface Design, and supervisor of many PhDs. She is a key proponent of Collections-based teaching, and in her role as Curator of the Department’s non-Latin Collections regularly leads sessions with archival material for students and researchers at all levels.
More details of the Medal ceremony can be found on the TDC site.
Women in Type
‘Women in type: a social history of women’s role in type-drawing offices, 1910–90’ is a new three-year research project now underway in the Department, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Fiona Ross. The project team includes Dr Alice Savoie and Dr Helena Lekka. For more information about this exciting and timely project, see the Leverhulme Trust’s newsletter for January 2018 (p. 11).
