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.
An exhibition in the Department charting the development of Chinese type and type-making technologies.
Chinese typeforms are the visual form or shape of Chinese characters in a typeface. They reflect the function of reading Chinese and the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy. Compared with Latin typefaces, the larger Chinese character set and the complexity and diversity of its typeforms have always presented a challenge to type makers, typeface designers, and typographers.
This exhibition charts the development of type and type-making technologies in China, from the invention of movable type in the eleventh century to the design of digital typefaces of today. It documents the rich variety of Chinese typefaces created in different eras using varied techniques and technologies, presented in high quality digital reproductions.
The exhibition is an abridged version of ‘Way of Type – Modernisation of Chinese typography’, originally curated by Jieqiong Yue and Zhao Liu, and is a collaboration between the University of Reading and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. It represents the first exhibition in the UK featuring Chinese typeforms and type design.
Open weekdays, 10 am to 5 pm. Closed bank holidays.
Installation photos
‘Way of type – Evolution of Chinese typeforms’: introduction panel.Main exhibition. Early Chinese movable type (left wall), Chinese movable type in Europe (right wall).Main exhibition. Chinese founts of missionaries (left wall); Chinese typewriter (end wall), based on posters by Thomas Mullaney; Type design in modern China (right wall).Main exhibition. Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter. Donated to the exhibition by Mr Xing Li.Main exhibition. Typeface specimens and font production materials.Contemporary Chinese typography. Typeforms shown on screen and in Chinese-language portfolios.Contemporary Chinese typography. Fifteen-piece puzzle for constructing typeforms.Exhibition window graphics.
Credits
China team Academic chair: Di’an Fan
Curators: Jieqiong Yue, Zhao Liu
Coordinators: Xi Yang, Ping Ju, Liping Du, Yanan Zhang
Assistant designers: Kui Zhu, Yue Chen, Peilin Song, Congyu Zhang, Kushim Jiang, Yangzhi Duan, Tengqi Zhaoxu
UK team Academic chair: Eric Kindel
Curator: Xunchang Cheng
Visual designers: Xicheng Yang, Huati Wulan, Ahmet Berke Demir
Production: Geoff Wyeth
Special thanks Thomas Mullaney, Yiyuan Ma, Li Xing
Texts by Min Wang, Mingyuan Sun, Zhongxiao Cong,
Xunchang Cheng, Guoyan Ji
Guided by China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration
Organisers University of Reading,
Central Academy of Fine Arts,
China Center for International Communication Development
Co-organisers Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
Co-Innovation Center for Art Creation and Research on Silk Road of CAFA
Special thanks Hanyi Fonts,
Arts Committee (University of Reading),
Shenzhen Graphic Design Association,
TypeTogether, LiuZhao Studio
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.
Applications are invited for the Michael Twyman Research Fellowship in Ephemera Studies in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading.
The Fellowship is available from September 2021, or a mutually agreed date and for a period of up to 12 months (we estimate this would equate to 2 to 3 months full-time equivalent) and will attract a stipend of £5,000.
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.
Early lithography around the world: objects, processes, and experiences was a workshop that was convened by Reading PhD candidates Borna Izadpanah, and Wei Jin Darryl Lim. It was conceived together with, and led by Professor Emeritus Michael Twyman, and was held in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication on the 27 March 2018. The workshop was planned as a series of informal sessions and brought together a select number of colleagues working internationally in various disciplines and professions, from conservation and restoration, to type design, and printing and book history.
A collections-based approach was central to Early lithography around the world. To that end, Michael Twyman drew upon his personal collection of printed artefacts originating from, and relating to the lithographic printing trade across two centuries, and set up a rare exposition – a miniature exhibition to be specific – of his personal collection of items, supplemented by the lithographic stones collection, and ephemera collection of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. Artefact- and materials-handling was instrumental to the delivery of the workshop, and at various instances participants were strongly encourage to handle, study, and observe – by sight and touch – the visual and material nuances of a variety of objects: from a miniature model of a star wheel press, lithographed trade cards, manuscript bills of sale, to limestone fragments from France and from the Solnhofen quarries in Bavaria.
Divided into several parts, the workshop was loosely arranged around the themes of lithographic stones and their sources, trade tools and technology, operations and production, and products of the press. Our session began with Michael presenting and highlighting the intrinsic importance of lithographic stones to the nature of the technology and trade, regardless of geographic location, or scale of printing operation. This intense, in-depth presentation about the geological qualities of the lithographic stone bred fertile discussion by drawing in a new area of research consideration, with participants sharing anecdotes and bringing contributions from their own areas of expertise and interests. This was followed by a discussion about the lithographer’s tools – pens, crayons, and various paraphernalia employed by writers working in the trade, and the technicalities, considerations, and issues behind the operation of a lithographic press. The printed products emanating from presses were examined next; with participants learning how to identify specific characteristics that gave clues into how a lithographed piece might have been originated, multiplied and printed. Particular attention was paid to distinguishing between writing done in reverse on stone, and work done the right way round on transfer paper, and then transferred to stone. Various types of artefacts – books, pamphlets, newspapers, ephemera – printed from the various sub-branches of lithographic technology were also meticulously examined and handled; including products printed by gillotage, a process that was used to convert lithographic marks made on stone (or transferred to it) into relief images.
Numerous productive discussions punctuated the day. Participants actively drew connections and shared insights from their own specialisations in Persian, South Asian and Southeast Asian branches of research, and shared understandings from their awareness of localised conditions of adapting and using lithographic presses, the qualities of how specific Asian scripts were rendered, all in relation to the topic of lithography. Attendees that participated in Early lithography around the world included Emily Müller, paper conservator and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Jasdip Singh Dhillon, book conservator with the Oxford Conservation Consortium with a keen interest in Sikh lithographed books; Aardarsh Rajan, Masters by Research candidate and type designer; Suman Bhandary, Masters in Typeface Design candidate; Sallie Morris, the Typography Department’s Collections Research Assistant; Professor Fiona Ross, a type designer and historian; and Vaibhav Singh, typographer, typeface designer, and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Reading.
'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.
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.
