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.
From a report about the ATypI Reykjavík conference
‘This year’s conference programme included talks on – at the very least – Arabic, Devanagari, Khmer, Korean, Latin, Meeti Mayek, Mongolian, and Tamil scripts. Aside from the annual TDC and TDC² exhibitions that have long been part of the ATypI conferences, this year saw the first World Scripts Exhibition from the collections of the Typography and Graphic Communication department of the University of Reading. Fiona Ross and Alice Savoie curated this fascinating glimpse into the resources available to students and researchers at Reading; many of the items included traveled outside of the archives for the first time in order to be part of this exhibition.’
‘Research room’ picnic, University of Reading, 1906
On 30 September the Department will host an interdisciplinary postgraduate workshop of designers, meteorologists and psychologists who will work together to re-think the design of weather forecasts. ‘Watching the weather’ is often more than a passing concern: it can be important when we’re planning events, choosing when to make a journey, setting our home heating etc. And it’s likely to become more important as the probability of of extreme weather conditions increases with climate change. In the workshop we’ll consider the best ways to present the increasingly complex information that meteorologists can generate to the general public.
The day is part of the programme of events within the Department’s AHRC-funded research network, LUCID.
