Max Gadney will give a talk ‘Working in Information Design’ on Wednesday, 26 October.
Max is an information designer who describes his brief as ‘making useful data products’. He led the Design Team at BBC News Online for several years and now works as a consultant with clients including The Guardian, Channel 4 and Manchester City. He runs the Design of Understanding conference.
The talk, open to all, will be at 4.30 in Typography, E1.
Pictures from our latest AHRC-funded LUCID postgraduate workshop, Designing the Weather. Designers, meteorologists and psychologists worked together to consider how the design of weather forecasts could be improved to increase public understanding, in particular how forecasts could be designed to show the differing probabilities of forecast events.
Click here for a video account of the workshop and its outcomes, and read more on the LUCID Ning and CIDR web site.
Here’s the team of jurors from the Letter.2 event: (from left) Rubén Fontana, visiting graphic designer Miguel Catopodis, Gerry Leonidas, Patricio Gatti (in whose workshop the judging took place), Fiona Ross, John Hudson, Lucie Lacava, Peter Bil’ak, Akira Kobayashi, and chairman José Scaglione. For a video of Gerry in action, see here.
Our new cohort of MAs arrived on Thursday, and if Ben Mitchell’s picture of a few of them is anything to go by, they’re already fired up with caffeine and laptops!
The Department is pleased to be hosting the New Baxter Society’s annual general meeting on Saturday 29 October. This members-only event will commence at 1.30pm with an opportunity to look at the display of Baxter material, followed by talks by Professor Michael Twyman and Martin Andrews. The meeting itself follows at 4pm.
¶ The Baxter process for colour printing by letterpress, patented by George Baxter in 1835, involved an initial metal keyplate and up to 20 wood or metal blocks to apply each individual colour.
Gerry Leonidas will be joining Phil Baines, Jonathan Barnbrook, Zoë Bather, Tom Farrand, Amelia Gregory, Matt Jones, Alan Kitching, Vaughan Oliver, Paul Rennie, Lucienne Roberts, Jack Schulze, Steve Watson, Matt Webb, Rebecca Wright, and Derek Yates on the platform at the two-day St Bride conference, 10–11 November 2011. Book here.
After a full two days of judging the Letter 2 competition, three of the judges spent the morning at the University of Buenos-Aires, the most prestigious institution in the country. We attended a presentation by recent graduates of the typeface design postgraduate course (which runs twice a week over eighteen months) and had the opportunity to address the students and staff of the course. We saw some excellent work – truly impressive, especially considering that this was the first cohort to graduate.
The UBA is a massive institution, operating very differently from UK universities: tuition is free, and admissions are in practice controlled by the limits to class sizes imposed at the level of the module (which is a larger unit that the UK module – something closer to a semester’s work). Professors employ a system of paid and voluntary assistants to manage the large group sizes, and most teachers are part-time. As during a previous visit to Argentina, both students and staff made us feel extremely appreciated for our contribution.
Henrique Nardi was busy snapping away, and posted some good images of the session on Flickr. Ruben Fontana, Pablo Cosgaya, Catherine Dixon, Marina Chaccur, and our alumnus José Scaglione (and local organiser of Letter 2), amongst others, are there.
Fiona Ross and Gerry Leonidas are busy in Buenos Aires right now judging the entries in letter.2, ATypI’s typeface design competition. And the chair of the jury is Reading alumnus José Scaglione of Type Together. The letter.2 conference follows on Tuesday 4 October, and Fiona and Gerry will talk about their research-based approach to typeface design, and how archive material in the Non-Latin Type Collection at Reading informs contemporary design decisions. Alejandro Lo Celso of PampaType, another Reading alumnus, will talk on type and cultural identity.
James Mosley spoke at the ESAD/Bibliothèques d’Amiens Métropole study day on Claude Garamont at Amiens last week, discussing the punch-cutter’s reputation, the types with which he is particularly associated (especially the Caractères de l’Université held by the Imprimerie Nationale), and the various ‘Garamonds’ created at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Department contributed speakers and events to the Univesity’s Researchers’ Night on the theme of Language, Text and Power.
Gerry Leonidas introduced visitors to the history of typography through an array of printed books and type specimens: he outlined how research in historical documents informs design decisions in contemporary environments. Using Greek as a case study, Gerry used original archival material to give examples of current design practice in areas as diverse as printed dictionaries, branded corporate material, and mobile device interfaces.
Paul Luna spoke at the Language, Text, and Power seminar on researching the past, designing the present. He looked at how analysing the layout of Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 can help formulate approaches to contemporary dictionaries, and about design decisions for a scholarly edition of the Book of Common Prayer. You can read the text of his presentation, with some of his illustrations, here.
Anke Ueberberg offered a hands-on experience for visitors, explaining the workings of Gutenberg’s press using a full size working replica, hand-made by Alan May, formerly a lecturer in the Department. Based on research recently published in the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, Alan’s press supports the view that a Dürer drawing of an early printing press, long thought erroneous, may in fact be an accurate portrayal.
