Author: gerryleonidas

Toshi Omagari featured in special issue of IDEA magazine

The highly esteemed Japanese design magazine IDEA dedicated an issue to the career of Toshi Omagari with the theme “Typeface design for the voice of the world: The Works of Toshi Omagari”. Toshi graduated with Distinction from the MA Typeface Design in 2010–11, and went on to work for several years for Monotype. More recently he set up his own foundry, and is now also a visiting teacher in the Department.

Toshi’s work spans both original work and revivals, and extends to numerous scripts: he is particularly notable for his work in Asian scripts for which there has not been extensive coverage in digital typefaces. He is also the author of Arcade Game Typography, the definitive book on arcade game pixel fonts, as well as numerous plugins to support font development. His teaching in our Masters spans workflows, design feedback, and approaches to global script design.

2020 Postgraduate Open Day

The Department of Typography & Graphic Communication warmly invites prospective MA applicants and offer holders to visit us for our annual postgraduate open day. This will be held in the Department on Thursday 5 March 2020 from 11.00–15.00.
This is a fantastic opportunity to find out more about the specialist postgraduate study routes we offer. You will be able to talk to current students and academic leads for our Book Design, Creative Enterprise, Graphic Design, Information Design, Typeface Design,  and Masters by Research options. View examples of student practical projects and dissertations, get a taste for our approach to collections-based teaching and research, and view highlights from our world-renowned Collections.

To register your interest and receive joining instructions, please email Victoria (typography@reading.ac.uk). We look forward to welcoming prospective MA students to the Department.

13 July: a celebration of letterforms and ephemera

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.

 

Chinese publishing collaboration proceeds

Group photo of the speakers and organisers of the Creative Chinese Character Industry Symposium

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.

Gerry Leonidas holds the proof copy of How to create typefaces

Bauhaus typeface revived by MATD student

Adobe’s “Hidden Treasures” programme kicks off the typographic commemoration of the forthcoming centenary of the Bauhaus school by releasing four revivals based on lettering by Bauhaus staff. Drawing on original material in the archives of the  Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, a group of current typeface design students were selected to work on digitising the original lettering, extrapolating the missing letterforms and characters to fill out the required character set, and adapt the designs for digital formats. The fast-paced project was led and supervised by Ferdinand Ulrich and Erik Spiekermann, and included in-person meetings in Berlin and Dessau, online collaboration, and a launch event in New York City.

Ferdinand Ulrich, Hidetaka Yamasaki, and Erik Spiekermann being captured working on the Bauhaus project. Image by Robyn Steffen

Each of the four typefaces were revived by a student from a typeface design course: Hidetaka Yamasaki, a current MA Typeface Design student, worked on lettering by Carl Marx; Céline Hurka from the KABK on letters by Alfred Arndt; Luca Pellegrini from the ECAL on lettering by Xanti Schawinsky; Elia Preuss from HGB Leipzig worked on letters by Reinhold Rossig; and Flavia Zimbardi on letters by Joost Schmidt. The typefaces are released gradually through Typekit’s subscription service to professionals using Adobe’s dominant suite of applications, and are a superb example of archival material inspiring contemporary design.

 

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.