Category: publications

Design Issues: visual essays

Sue Walker joins Design Issues as Associate Editor, Archives to develop visual essays that derive from high quality collections and archives of design-related materials worldwide.

Design Issues, the first American academic journal to examine design history, theory, and criticism, provokes enquiry into the cultural and intellectual issues surrounding design. It is one of the world’s foremost research journals and a flagship product of MIT Press.

 Call for contributions

We are looking for visual essays that explain an important and interesting ‘design issue’, from any period, through images from a collection or archive. This might be

  • a set of related images that explains something, or tells a story, of cultural or social importance
  • a set of seemingly unrelated images that, when accompanied by verbal explanation, become linked together to tell something new
  • a series of single images that each represent a significant cultural or social issue

Each essay will be six black-and-white pages designed by MA Book Design students at the University of Reading, under the supervision of the Programme Director, Ruth Blacksell. The published material will have to be accompanied by copyright clearance on all the visual material.

Send proposals, or ideas for discussion, to:

Prof Sue Walker
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
University of Reading
Whiteknights
Reading RG6 2AU

Email: s.f.walker@reading.ac.uk

Using collections in research

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just published in the Journal of Design History, a paper by Sue Walker based on material in the Otto and Marie Neurath Collection, discusses an iconic series of books for children. ‘Explaining history to children: Otto and Marie Neurath’s work on the Visual History of Mankind’ is part of the AHRC-funded ‘Isotype revisited’ project www.isotyperevisited.org

Full Text:
http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/eps031?
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PDF:
http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/eps031?
ijkey=7xIdEtKckzoulZB&keytype=ref

Type in Europe

James Mosley and Alice Savoie are contributors to a new book published to coincide with the Congrès des Musées Européens de l’Imprimerie in Lyon. James Mosley contributes an inventory of ‘the materials of typefounding’, while Alice (who is an AHRC-funded research student) writes with Alan Marshall and Bernadette Moglia on ‘our typographic heritage’.

Copies are available from www.imprimerie.lyon.fr

La lettre en Europe

Whatever Next

Whatever Next

Founded by Camberwell Press‘ creative director, James Edgar, Whatever Next: a discourse in typography is an exhibition and book stemming from a series of conversations that took place in 2011. The discussions are prefaced by four essays, one of which is by Gerry Leonidas. The book will be launched at the Kemistry Gallery on 4 October, with a corresponding exhibition of visual responses to the discussions by contributors. The exhibition will run until 20 October, and is open daily 10:00–18:00, and 11:00–16:00 on Saturdays.

Picturing social facts: Neurath workshop proceedings published

During the Isotype Revisited project, Christopher Burke and Eric Kindel contributed to a workshop, ‘Picturing social facts: on Neurath’s visual language’, delivering papers alongside Friedrich Stadler, Elisabeth Nemeth, Sybilla Nikolow, Sophie Hochhäusl, Hadwig Kraeutler, Karl H. Müller & Armin Reautschnig, and Bart Lootsma. This was part of the 33rd International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium, held in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, in August 2010.

The second volume of the symposium Proceedings have now been published, containing the workshop papers, as well as a series of papers on the theory and history of diagrams. Christopher Burke’s paper is titled ‘The linguistic status of Isotype’, and Eric Kindel’s ‘Reaching the people: Isotype beyond the West’. The volume, edited Richard Heinrich, Elisabeth Nemeth, Wolfram Pichler and David Wagner, can be previewed and purchased here.