Revival

‘The same river twice’: Curwen Press and revivalism in book design

Alan Powers will examine the inter-war years, concentrating on British typography and illustration, exploring the relationship between innovation and revival, and arguing that post-modernism has always been, in the words of François Lyotard, ‘modernism as it is coming into being, and the state is constant’.

Alan Powers is Professor of Architecture and Cultural History at the University of Greenwich and the author of books and articles on twentieth century British art, architecture and design, including Art and Print: The Curwen Story, Tate Publications, 2008.

Mock-historic: revivalist cover design

In recent years, a number of book covers have referenced antique bindings and other historic styles. This talk is an overview of the books, the references and the reasons behind this revivalist trend in book cover design.

Eleanor Crow was a book cover designer for seven years at Random House, before becoming Art Director at the Folio Society in 2007. She is now a senior designer at Faber & Faber.

Money for old rope: repackaging the classics

Due to the increasingly-competitive nature of trade publishing, frontlist titles alone cannot be relied upon to generate sufficient revenue to appease rapacious shareholders. Therefore, publishers are looking at ever-more inventive ways to republish their backlist titles and in turn, redefine their brand identity. David will be discussing several of his backlist series designs, ranging from the award-winning Great Ideas series through to the launch of his own publishing house, White’s Books.

David is a freelance book designer, working from East London. He previously worked in-house at Penguin Books – as a text designer and then later, a cover designer – before leaving to set up his own studio in August 2007.

Conversations with elders

It may be a cliché to say that practitioners and students of an adolescent subject like typography still have much to learn through dialogue with past masters: ‘not so much Revival as Investigation’, as one of them once asserted. But who to share a table with? Is speed dating the best bet? Reliable answers not guaranteed.

Paul Stiff worked in book publishing before joining the University of Reading, where he has taught typography and information design for many years. Among his pleasurable projects is Typography Papers, the eighth volume of which is currently assembling.

Rail Alphabet to New Rail Alphabet

The development of the typeface New Rail Alphabet, in six weights, a revival of Margaret Calvert’s 1965 signing face for British Rail. Designed in collaboration with Margaret Calvert.

Henrik Kubel was taught by Margaret Calvert at Royal College of Art 1998–2000, and upon graduation formed A2/SW/HK with fellow graduate Scott Williams. The team has a conceptual approach to problem solving across various disciplines, including design for print, screen and environment. A2/SW/HK create bespoke typefaces and custom-made design solutions for each project that are informed and shaped by a clear understanding of both content and context. Recent clients include Afterall, Tate Britain, V&A Museum, Hayward Gallery, Faber & Faber, British Council, Royal Mail, Phaidon Press, Penguin Press New York, Lisson Gallery and Danish Post.

www.a2swhk.co.uk

OABs: old age brands

Kath and Julia will be talking about various brands which have reached pensionable age, and how they have been revived by johnson banks, including the British Film Institute (aged 76), and Save The Children (aged 90 this May).

Kath Tudball & Julia Woollams met whilst studying graphic design at Central Saint Martins and started collaborating in 2000; they then took the unusual step of seeking a design job as a duo after their graduation. They now work together as the senior design team at johnson banks, an award winning London design studio, founded and directed by Michael Johnson since 1992.

johnson banks specialises in ideas-focused branding to solve clients’ problems strategically and creatively. The company may be small, but its innovative approach to design attracts interest from all over the world – currently the studio is running projects in the UK, USA and Japan. Whilst johnson banks’ main body of work centres around identity schemes, it has gained equal recognition for its innovative stamp designs, unusual print work and quirky products.

There may well be mistakes

Ben and Russell from Really Interesting Group will talk about the role of printing and paper in a post-digital world. A role based on what it’s good at, not on nostalgia. Well, all right, maybe a bit of nostalgia.

Really Interesting Group is a multi disciplinary organisation working in post digital design.

Reviving paper craft: quilling in a new context

Paper craft is often associated with women’s and children’s hobbies, and regarded with some disdain, mainly because it lacks the positive evaluative connotations that ‘art’ and ‘design’ have. Using the example of my own illustration commissions, I will speak about how making creative use of quilling can give this paper craft technique a new life and significance in the context of graphic communication.

Yulia Brodskaya was born in Russia (Moscow); prior to moving to the UK she was interested in diverse creative practices ranging from textile painting, origami and collage to more traditional fine art practices. Following an MA in Graphic Communication (2006, University of Hertfordshire) she has continued to experiment and explore ways of bringing together all the things she likes most: typography, paper, and highly detailed hand-made craft objects. Her clients include: Orange, The Guardian, The New York Times, O.B., New Scientist, WIRED, Nokia and Starbucks.

Same difference, or: what is the type designer doing, and why?

A typeface design is a carefully managed relationship between necessary difference and necessary sameness: the individual signs must be distinct in order to be recognised, and they must be the same in order to function together as a set. This is the core ‘problem’ that a typeface design must solve, but it is one that type designers tend not to think about conceptually, relying instead on past practice and on the canons of more than 500 years of typographic history.

John Hudson treats this relationship between difference and sameness as a conceptual framework for design strategies, and in this lecture discusses its impact on his work. He looks at various ways in which consciousness of this relationship informs everything from individual letter design to harmonisation of multiple writing systems. And, responding to the theme of this year’s conference, he considers how a new understanding of revival might lurk in this ‘same difference’.

John Hudson is a type designer, specialising in custom font development for software internationalisation and scholarly publishing. He is the co-founder of Tiro Typeworks, Canada, and for fifteen years has created new typefaces for numerous writing systems, many of them for Microsoft, Adobe and other major software companies.

New life for old faces: the retro view of types

The recasting of old types has a history that goes back 150 years. With the coming of new technologies in the 20th century the remaking of old models also meant their reinterpretation, and the repertoire of present-day fonts is littered with the successes and disasters that resulted. This talk will pick its way among them.

James Mosley is Visiting Professor in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading. He writes and lectures on the history of type and letterforms. Until 2000 he was librarian of the St Bride Library. His blog, ‘Typefoundry’, is at: http://typefoundry.blogspot.com

Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo (OTSP): Past and present reconnected

This talk will introduce the Brazilian letterpress workshop OTSP, set up in 2004 and dedicated to the activities of teaching and design experimentation. Among the editorial projects of the OTSP will be shown the portfolio Além da Letra (Beyond the Letter), set in metal and wood types. This portfolio project was focused on the materiality of typographic experience and explores the boundaries of content and form: here, we could add to the words of Eric Gill (‘Letters are things, not picture of things’): Letters are pure forms, not only a media for content.

Claudio Rocha was born 1957 in São Paulo, Brazil. He began his career as a graphic designer in 1975. Now also a writer, teacher and type designer (ITC Gema and ITC Underscript) he is editor of the magazines Tupigrafia (Brazil) and Tipoitalia (Italy). A co-founder of the experimental letterpress workshop Oficina Tipografica São Paulo, Rocha is currently living in Genoa.

On launching a new story comic for children

See the brave little ship DFC on her maiden voyage, sailing amid dark and stormy skies, straight into the midst of Hurricane Credit Crunch!!!

David Fickling is a children’s book editor and publisher. He started his career with Oxford University Press in 1977, moving on to Transworld and then to Scholastic UK. In 1999, David formed his own imprint, David Fickling Books, which is now based with Random House. He publishes about a dozen titles per year in the US, Australia and New Zealand as well as the UK. Recent titles include Philip Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford, Mark Haddon’s The curious incident of the dog in the night-time, John Boyne’s The boy in the striped pyjamas and Linda Newbery’s 2007 Costa Award-winning Set in stone.

Sarah McIntyre creates a weekly strip in the DFC called Vern and Lettuce, about a sheep and a rabbit who live in a tower block in Pickle Rye, based very much on the neighbourhood in south London where she lives. She just finished the illustrations for an upcoming monster picture book with David Fickling, which her friends say they love and her mother insists is absolutely disgusting and why can’t she do something nice?

Alvin Lustig & the Foyes Corner Launderette

The digital world is great, no doubt about it, but I constantly need inspiriation from the past. From badly drawn shop signs, to renowned designers, such as Lustig, I need the feel & texture of the human touch in order to function as a designer/illustrator in the 21st century.

Jonny Hannah was born & bred in Dunfermline, Fife. He studied at Liverpool, then the Royal College of Art. For the past 11 years he has worked constantly as a freelance designer. His many clients include The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times, & the St. Kilda Courier.

Four Corners familiars

The series of ‘familiars’ from Four Corners Books features artists’ responses to classic novels and short stories. Each book is an exercise in style and format. The talk will centre around the design of the first three titles: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, and Blumfeld, an elderly bachelor.

From the Typography department at the University of Reading, John Morgan joined Derek Birdsall at Omnific. In 2000 he established John Morgan studio. Morgan’s projects include prayer books for the church of England, granite poetry for the BBC, exhibition design for the Design Museum, art direction for Phillips de Pury, and in progress a new graphic identity for David Chipperfield Architects.

Alternative histories and historical alternates: fluidity and fiction in typographic revivals

This talk will examine recent approaches to type revival as the expression of a post-modern perspective on type history. Focusing upon instances where historical models are used in a hypothetical, a-historical or ironic manner, it will examine the ways in which the concept of ‘revival’ has developed beyond a concern for historical fidelity, repositioning the typeface as a medium of cultural interpretation and speculative enquiry.

Will Hill is Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. He recently completed an MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading. His dissertation ‘Historical reference and revival in twentieth-century type design’ is to be published by Mark Batty Academic. He has given conference papers at the St Brides and Moving Type conferences, the Lodz Design Festival and the Agrafa conference, Katowice. He has recently contributed to the book Font: the sourcebook and The Phaidon Compendium of Graphic Design, and is currently working for Black Dog on the forthcoming title Art and Text.

Meaning from the urban jumble

On both Thursday and Friday at 14·00, Martin Wilson be in the exhibition room to talk about his work on display.

Martin Wilson trained as a graphic designer, and makes a living as an Art Director for Dorling Kindersley Children’s books. During his free time he is busy creating photographic artworks that tease meaning from the urban jumble. His work captures words and letters from urban typography, such as road signs, number plates and billboards, or crafts new letter forms from material as unpromising as rubbish and road markings. He then re-appropriates these to spell out unexpected, but often familiar, messages. His pictures are painstakingly created frame by frame on 35mm film, with the final images appearing only when the completed film strips are laid out side by side on contact sheets. Each work usually takes months to complete, as each word letter or image is obsessively taken in sequence, rather than pasted together after the event. If he makes a mistake or takes a frame out of place he starts the film again from the beginning. His works are all records of real journeys, the visual remnants of hours walking or cycling round town, reviving the forgotten voices of the city.

Paul Antonio studied typography at the University of Reading, before gaining a distinction in Calligraphy, Illumination and Heraldic Art from Reigate, finishing his studies at Birkbeck in English Palaeography, Archaeological Illustration and Arabic Calligraphy. He runs a lettering practice in London, UK. His clients include Polo Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford International, Tiffany & Co., and Cartier. Commissions to reproduce manuscript pages provide the basis for his research in historical letterform. Paul also works with the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and has taught recently on Cursive Hieroglyphs for Birkbeck.

www.paulantonioscribe.com

Mark Frith is a lettercutter and stonecarver with over 20 years experience. He has produced a wide range of work in stone or wood, and is known for his work with sundials and inscriptions in foreign scripts and languages. The most notable work of this kind, undertaken with Sally Bower, is the Language Pillar which contains an inscription from the Dalai Lama at the Tibetan Peace Garden in London. The inscription carved on each side of the pillar is in four different languages: Tibetan, English, Hindi and Chinese. Mark entered into the world of lettering having studied at the City and Guilds of London, followed several years working for Richard Kindersley working on a huge variety of architectural lettering projects. He is also a member of Letter Exchange

Helen Ingham set up The Hi-Artz Press in 2002, producing highly expressive letterpress work with strong typographical and illustrative elements. She studied MA Communication Design at Central St Martins and was an intern at Hatch Showprint in Nashville. She carries out editorial and private commissions, exhibits in galleries and instructs at Central St Martins and London Metropolitan University.

www.hi-artz.co.uk

Phil Surey began in the sign trade in 1983 with a desire to become a signwriter. The impact of computerisation on traditional signwriting led him to broaden his skills at the City & Guilds of London Art School, completing a 3 year lettering course in 1996. He now works in London as a freelance signwriter and lettercarver.

Demonstrations begin at 15·45 on Thursday and take place in the Exhibition Room