We are sorry to say that Michael died at the weekend. We will have a celebration of his life in the Department in 2026.
Category: staff
Microsoft’s 50th anniversary has a Reading touch
Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary with the launch of a new font, Kermit. The new font helps children to read more easily, improves comprehension, and helps dyslexic readers. It does this by making letter-formation visible in real time, and enabling prosody to be represented typographically. Designed by Underware, Kermit uses innovative Higher Order Interpolation to represent the act of writing strokes in digital form. The typeface ships with Office in the four basic styles, but is a variable font, so can be experienced in multiple style instances. The new font is introduced in Microsoft Design, and there is a demo site on Kermit Font.
The Department supported in its way the project: the program manager at Microsoft is MATD alumnus Rob McKaughan, Gerry Leonidas and alumna Irene Vlachou helped with the Greek complement, and Aaron Bell (also an MATD graduate) hinted the fonts. Gerry also wrote one of the accompanying texts on the demo site.
User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests: guidance and tools
Sue Walker and Josefina Bravo have produced guidance in the form of a toolkit and a dataset for the design of instructions to support home and community diagnostic testing. This derived from the AHRC-funded Covid Rapid Response project ‘Information Design for Diagnostics: Ensuring Confidence and Accuracy for Home Sampling and Home Testing’. The work was also support by funding from the University of Reading’s Rapid Response Policy Engagement funding from Research England, which enabled consultation with research users and implementors of the toolkit.
User-friendly point-of-use instructions for home use diagnostic tests provides evidence-based guidance and tools for manufacturers of tests, service providers and content and design specialists who produce instructions to accompany diagnostic tests for home and community use.
The toolkit, organised in 5 sections provides guidance on writing, visual organisation and how to engage with your users. A related data set includes templates and illustrations for download and use.
An open-access account of the project is in Information Design Journal doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.22011.wal
Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012
Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012, an exhibition in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication surveying the experimental graphic practice of the American designer, Ed Fella.
Design Thinking for undergraduate applicants
Our department has a history of putting users at the centre of the design process. James Lloyd has been speaking to school leavers about what this means in terms of the kind of people we're looking for when we review their applications.
Armchair travel: exploring Central Asia in books
An exhibition of books about exploring, trekking and travelling in Central Asia, next to the Reading Room.
Fiona Ross at Type Drives Culture
The NYC-based Type Directors Club will hold a one-day conference with the theme 'Type: More _ than Ever' to celebrate the importance of type and typography in global culture. The keynote speaker for the event will be Fiona Ross, who is also a TDC Medal recipient.
Paul Luna: a very short introduction to typography
'It's not all about fonts!' At a special Baseline Shift session, our former Head of Department stressed the importance of design for reading.
Facing the world
'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.
Research introductions
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.