Opening the Education Forum in Typecon Milwaukee, Gerry offered a model for design education focused on typographically-rich environments on tablets, mostly. He talked about teaching the combination of paragraph-level typographic skills, information architecture, and interaction design required for designing complex documents like newspapers on small tablet screens. The slides (without commentary) are on SpeakerDeck.
Tag: typeface design
Universities are living things…
So starts a quote by this University’s first Vice-Chancellor, selected by the current VC, Sir David Bell KCB. On a very tight deadline, we produced a keepsake (pictured above) to present to the Rt Hon Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for Education, on the occasion of the launch of the University’s Institute of Education, on 21 June (press release). We wanted something special, that would reflect the breadth of University life.
Rafael Saraiva, a student on the MA Typeface Design programme, did the lettering and designed the typeface in which the text is set in. Darren Lewis, Head of the University’s Design & Print Studio, oversaw the printing on the University’s digital press. Gerry Leonidas, Director of the MA Typeface Design, specified the typography and supervised the project.
Collaborative type design in Adobe Creative Suite 6
The new Creative Suite 6 will ship with a Devanagari typeface in two weights, designed collaboratively by Tim Holloway, Fiona Ross and John Hudson. The new typeface, first released in 2011, had to be legible in both screen and print in text-intensive documents, while addressing the challenges of the heavier weight and offering a distinctive, modern interpretation of the script. The typeface takes a new approach to a traditional script, achieving a dynamic, fluid style with open counters, delicately flaring strokes, and a rounded treatment of distinguishing elements.
This design approach is intended to counter the effect of repetitive verticals and horizontals prevalent in earlier typefaces. OpenType features and a character set of around 800 characters are employed to achieve a more sophisticated typographic texture, utilising alternative contextual forms, and regional variants.
More details and images on the Adobe Typblography blog.
Reading types in Oxford English dictionaries
Many of the various printed editions of Oxford dictionaries are now typeset principally in Parable, a typeface designed by Christopher Burke, Research Fellow in the Department. These include the Concise, Compact, Paperback, Pocket, Little, and Colour Oxford Dictionary as well as the Oxford Paperback Thesaurus. Parable is also used effectively in the Oxford Dictionary of English (pictured) – a hefty hardback representing contemporary usage – for the entry texts, alongside Frutiger and Argo (designed by our Visiting Professor, Gerard Unger).
Christopher designed Parable between 1996 and 2002, specifically for use at small typesizes in books such as dictionaries and bibles. It was introduced into the Oxford dictionary range in 2004 by OUP designer Michael Johnson (also an alumnus of the department) when he was redesigning the Concise Oxford Dictionary. At Michael’s request, Christopher designed an alternative italic ampersand especially for the entry ‘ampersand’, because the dictionary’s editors were uncomfortable with Parable’s Granjonesque one. (See more about this here.)
Interview in the Haaretz
Earlier in the year Reading alumnus Adi Stern, now the Head of the Visual Communication department at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, invited Gerry Leonidas to give two lectures and work with students of the academy. One lecture was for a wide audience in the academy and visitors (entitled “Where is type now?”) and one for the annual staff meeting of the Academy, on the approach taken at Reading in integrating research and teaching in design. Haaretz reporter Yuval Saar interviewed Gerry during the trip, and the interview is now online (in Hebrew).
MATD project work in Instapaper
The latest update to Instapaper (AppleStore link) includes six new typefaces, including two that started as MATD student projects: FF Tisa by Mitja Miklavčič (2006) and Elena by Nicole Dotin (2007). Instapaper, a 4+ rated app, allows the user to collect content for reading in a highly user-friendly environment on an iPhone, iPad, or a personal computer. Extended commentary (and an image of Elena on the iPad) over at Typenotes.
Greek typography and typeface design in New York
Five years after the first Greek Week-End in New York, Gerry Leonidas will return to the TDC. Already in 2007 Greek was becoming a central part of most large typeface projects, especially international branding applications. In the intervening years Greek has become a key aspect of professional designers’ skills, and a regular expectation in job postings. Just as importantly, Greek represents a particularly rewarding challenge for designers, combining a long and complex development with a relatively wide space for designers to experiment. The two-and-a-half day workshop will start with a hands-on research session, and include seminars on aspects of Greek typeface design, in-depth reviews of reference contemporary typefaces, and design critiques of work by the participants.
Gerry will also deliver a lecture at the TDC Salon on the deign of the forthcoming Greek-English Intermediate Lexicon, a major new publication by Cambridge University Press, now in its final stages. The Lexicon takes advantage of recent developments in typeface design, and offers insights into a particularly challenging typographic brief.
MA student Joana da Silva at the Encontro Nacional de Tipografia
Joana da Silva, one of our MA Typeface Design students, will be a speaker at the Encontro Nacional de Tipografia conference, hosted by the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal, on 30 September. I can’t read Portuguese, but I can just about decipher the “Áreas de interesse”, and it made me think “I wish I could be there”. Good names are already on the speakers’ and organisers’ lists.
My first visit to Portugal (for ATypI 2006, in Lisbon) was an eye opener: there was strong community of designers and teachers in typography and typeface design, but they were not making their presence felt much outside the country. In the last five years this has started to change at an increasing pace. Events like the Encontro help develop a particularly regional take on typography.
The Encontro organisers are keeping the event modest in length, which has to be applauded. As larger typographic gatherings grow in numbers (ATypI, Typecon, TypoBerlin, the new TypoLondon, and others I forget) it is the smaller events, of one or two days at most, with modest registration fees, that become more rewarding to attend. Although the big typo-events are always appealing, it is the smaller events that fit better in a full typographic calendar. (I’m thinking of the many one-day events and one annual two-day conference at St Bride Library, the relatively new TypeTalks, the IDC in Katowice, amongst others.) Who knows? Maybe in a few years the big-ticket events will only be every two or three years, like the bi-annual CIT Valencia and Tipos Latinos, and the tri-annual ICTVC. (Or every ten, like the wonderfully far-sighted ATypI Letter2 event!)
But, hidden in the competition of the growing number of events for our time (and wallet) are two especially good developments: that most of the new events are based in countries that do not have a long tradition of typographic gatherings; and that there are many young speakers who are designers, teachers, and researchers. As typography and typeface design are getting established in ever more schools and universities, we can look forward to more events like the Encontro.
