On 11 June we are launching an online showcase of our students' work.
To stay updated, please fill in the form at https://forms.gle/aHAr1iQwZEdbrEpr5 . You can also follow us at https://www.instagram.com/greaterthanatoz/ for a preview.
Category: exhibitions
Real Jobs: Celebrating over five decades of professional design practice on our undergraduate course
Alongside our degree show opening last week, we also launched a new exhibition celebrating our ‘Real Jobs’ scheme.
Real Jobs has been our flagship professional experience programme for as long as Typography has existed as a department. It allows our students their first taste of working alongside clients to co-create, and deliver on, a design brief. Our graduates regularly tell us that their experiences on these projects exposed them to unique and powerful moments that helped them secure their first paid positions, and continue to inform their professional practice today.
Standout projects on display include the Tomos Jones’ recent gold medal-winning University display at the Chelsea Flower Show and Maddi Davies’ collaborative project on Margaret Atwood, Second Sight. But a full range of work is on show, everything from books to branding, and we hope it is a fitting tribute to the students, staff and clients who have contributed to making Real Jobs such a successful part of the curriculum here in Typography.
The exhibition runs until 28 June. If you’ve ever been a client of Real Jobs, or if you’d like to know more about how the scheme could help your project or organisation, please do stop by to enjoy this celebration of five decades of students’ first steps into the world of professional graphic design.
To see our archive of recent Real Jobs, click here. If you think you have a project that would benefit from student design support you can also book in your own project here.
“I believe this is a great scheme, both supporting students with real life projects and work experience and also providing great value to small companies in need of professional design support” – Sirin Myles, International Education Consultant
“The Real Jobs scheme is an excellent way for students to get experience working towards a brief and is a great way to help everyone involved gain experience that will be useful when transitioning into a working environment. I will be recommending the scheme to my employer as I believe it provides unique opportunities for all involved.” – Isabel Cash, Holland House Books
—brace the space: Typography degree show 2019
We’d like to thank everyone who attended the private view of our degree show on Thursday evening. Our graduating class of BA Graphic Communication and MA Book Design students hosted a fantastic event which showcased not only their outstanding design work, but also their truly exemplary sense of teamwork and studio culture. Every aspect of the show – from promotion through to signage – is led by the students, and this year’s huge attendance and impressive co-ordination is testament to their efforts.
We’ll publish photos of the standout work on our flickr site shortly, and the student-run instagram is likely to fill up with more content soon. Meanwhile, if you’d like to see some of the work right away (including projects that won our coveted annual examiners awards), please do head over to the Department and ’embrace the space’ to enjoy the public view between Monday 17 and Saturday 22 June. The show covers everything from cutting edge UX to traditional book crafts, and there is an especially strong sense of experimentation and individuality this year.
For more information, visit https://embracethe.space
20th-century Persian newspaper types: investigating the design process
An exhibition exploring the design process of the most significant twentieth-century Persian newspaper types.
Armchair travel: exploring Central Asia in books
An exhibition of books about exploring, trekking and travelling in Central Asia, next to the Reading Room.
Richard Bird: National Theatre posters
Richard Bird (1948–1993) worked under Ken Briggs at the National Theatre 1972 to 1975. In 1975 Bird became resident head of graphics at the theatre’s new South Bank location. Some of these posters were also worked on by Michael Mayhew, who took over from Bird in 1986.
Further reading: Rick Poynor National Theatre Posters: A Design History, which can be found in the Reading Room
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.
Letterpress: possibilities & practice
Due to popular demand, now on until 20 July 2018
We’re pleased to announce the continuation of our exhibition, ‘Letterpress: possibilities & practice’, until Friday 20 July 2018. Stop by to see a range of innovative letterpress practices and possibilities. To tempt you, two practices in the exhibition are featured below. Read on!
Reconstructing historical typography
Letterpress printing practice encompasses scholarly investigations of historical typography in pursuit of new knowledge. The two examples on display here involve the reconstruction of fifteenth-century relief printing surfaces in an effort to better understand the production of well known incunable works. The type on the left (in the image, below) is a facsimile of that used in Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, printed in 1455. It has been composed to replicate a page from that book. The type was produced as part a BBC Four documentary, ‘The machine that made us’, on the life and work of Johannes Gutenberg, featuring Alan May alongside Martin Andrews and Stephen Fry. On the right are type and decorated borders and initials that together comprise a speculative reconstruction of the relief surfaces used to print a multi-coloured page from the 1457 Mainz Psalter of Fust & Schoeffer. The reconstruction was part of a research project to investigate Fust & Schoeffer’s probable working methods.
Re-invention of historical technique
This work has been created by the Leipzig designer, Pierre Pané-Farré. It takes its inspiration from compound-plate printing, a nineteenth-century technique that exploited multiple interlocking printing surfaces. Inked separately (in different colours) and then combined, a single impression would be taken from the interlocking surfaces, resulting in precisely aligned multicolour printed images. Pané-Farré has revisited the technique using laser-cut MDF printing surfaces, which produced the various sets of interlocking components displayed here. Ink was applied to each component in the set, either as ‘flat’ colour or in graduated hues. The set was then printed in a single impression to produce the polychromatic prints. The project was accompanied by the publication of Die polychrome Druckerei (Leipzig: Institut für Buchkunst, 2014), which reproduces the prints in four-colour offset lithography. Pané-Farré cites Michael Twyman’s book, Printing 1770–1970 (1970), and Maureen Greenland’s doctoral thesis, ‘Compound-plate printing: a study of a nineteenth-century colour printing process’ (University of Reading, 1996), as starting points for his work.
Letterpress: possibilities & practice
An exhibition in the Department
Until 28 April 2018
Letterpress printing has never lacked dedicated practitioners since its decline as a mainstream commercial printing process. But its conspicuous use in recent years – in the UK, Germany, Italy, USA, Brazil and many other places – is evidence of a resurgent interest in letterpress as an engine for research, design and making. Driving this interest is in part a renewed valuation of the materiality of print as a counterweight to the disembodied digital form of much present-day typography and graphic communication.
Recent letterpress practices are renovating and expanding the process. This exhibition presents some of these practices, alongside complementary examples from the 1980s and 90s. They involve the exploration of print effects, the visual formation of language, the reconstruction or reinvention of historical technique, the reconfiguration of letterpress in ‘post-digital’ form, and more. Taken together, the work on display suggests that letterpress printing continues to offer many possibilities for scholarly, speculative and commercial endeavour.
Practices on display:
- Reconstruction of historical typography: Gutenberg, Fust & Schoeffer
(Martin Andrews, Alan May) - Impressions of historical types: Louis John Pouchée
(Ian Mortimer, James Mosley) - Re-invention of historical technique: compound-plate printing
(Pierre Pané-Farré) - Independent workshop practice
(Alan Kitching / The Typography Workshop, London; p98a, Berlin) - Independent book production
(Juliet Shen, Bram de Does, Giulia Garbin and Stefano Riba) - Post-digital printing
(p98a, Berlin; Suhrkamp Letterpress) - Structure in type and language
(Phil Baines) - Variation in series
(Eric Kindel) - Colour overprinting, split-fount printing
(Charan Aruja, Katy Mawhood, Susann Vatnedal)
Thanks to those individuals who have kindly loaned items for exhibition: Simon Esterson, Gerry Leonidas, Pierre Pané-Farré, Erik Spiekermann, Ferdinand Ulrich, Susann Vatnedal.
Display and texts by Eric Kindel.
Emigre magazine: design, discourse and authorship
An exhibition in the Department
12 June – 14 July 2017
Emigre magazine, co-founded in California in 1984 by Rudy VanderLans, was a provocative and highly adventurous fusion of self-publishing, critical writing and experimental typography. This exhibition investigates a key period in the development of graphic design as a form of authorship and shows how Emigre’s page designs and typefaces embodied new thinking about the designer’s role in communication.
With an initial print run of 3,000–5,000 copies, the magazine was supported by a design studio, Emigre Graphics, and by a digital type foundry led by VanderLans’ partner Zuzana Licko. Emigre published 69 issues in a range of formats, from tabloid to paperback book, before closing in 2005, and it was probably the most admired, influential and criticised design magazine of its era.
In the 1990s, the idea that graphic design could be a form of authorship was the focus of intense debate among designers. VanderLans created a vital forum for discussion during a period of rapid change and Emigre’s design and content inspired an international network of visual communicators. The magazine was an era-defining example of entrepreneurial design authorship, which still has lessons for self-publishers today, and a platform where designers could explore the relationship of writing and design.
The exhibition, co-curated by MA Book Design student Francisca Monteiro and Prof. Rick Poynor, draws from the University of Reading’s Special Collections and Rick’s personal collection. The display is divided into sections that reflect the range of Emigre’s activities:
Rudy VanderLans as editor
The Emigre type foundry led by Zuzana Licko
VanderLans as a graphic author
The Emigre Music record label
Emigre as a space for collaborative authorship for designers and writers
Emigre considered in context