Science communication for children

A new AHRC-funded project begins today. Transforming science for young people: Marie Neurath and Isotype books for children aims to find new audiences for the approach to science communication taken by Marie Neurath in her books for children, produced in the 1940s and 1950s.  The illustrations in these books, in series such as the ‘Wonder world of nature’ and ‘Wonders of the modern world’, were innovative in their approach to the design of complex information.

Following on from Isotype revisited, the project will make extensive use of the materials in the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, to identify approaches to science communication relevant to teaching in primary schools today. We will work with teachers and teacher educators as part of the design process to ensure that their ideas and needs are taken into account. Pilot schools will be involved in evaluating the effectiveness of the resources to ensure they are relevant and effective.

An exhibition at House of Illustration in London in summer 2019, Marie Neurath: Picturing Science, will display examples of Marie Neurath’s illustrations from the children’s books, as well as sketches, drawings and correspondence that show the iterative nature of the design process.

Project people and partners

Prof Sue Walker and Prof Eric Kindel, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading

Dr Andrew Happle, Institute of Education, University of Reading

Dr Emma Minns (Project Officer)

Partners:

Design Science

House of Illustration

Activity in Antwerp

Our use of the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections in the Typography Department, and our distinctive approach to collections-based research, was exceptionally well demonstrated at the 2018 ATypI conference in Antwerp. We enjoyed top quality presentations by Typography staff and PhD students. In a conference with over 550 international delegates, who repeatedly mentioned the ‘Reading’ influence in conversations and comments, it was humbling to realise just how influential and significant our work with collections has been in developing new knowledge about type and typography, and in inspiring people to undertake research.

Typography staff

Fiona Ross and Alice Savoie introduced their new Leverhulme-funded project: ‘Women in Type
Eric Kindel: ‘Objet-type: the French stencil letter

AHRC-funded Design Star PhD students

Riccardo Olocco: ‘The success of Jenson’s roman type
Borna Izadpanah: ‘Early Persian printing and typography in Europe

Recently graduated PhD student

Emanuela Conidi: ‘Uncovering Arabic type history, informing design

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.

Reconstructing historical typography. Gutenberg, 42-line Bible. Reconstructed B-42 printing type (in vitrine, at left); page printed from reconstructed type (on wall, at left). Produced by Alan May and others, c. 2008 (original: 1455). Fust & Schoeffer, Mainz Psalter. Reconstructed three-colour printing surface; blocks for single-colour pre-inking (in vitrine, at right); printed page (on wall, at right). Produced by Alan May, c. 2013 (original: 1457).

Gutenberg, 42-line Bible. Reconstructed B-42 printing type (detail).

Fust & Schoeffer, Mainz Psalter. Reconstructed three-colour printing surface; blocks for single-colour pre-inking (at right).

Fust & Schoeffer, Mainz Psalter. Reconstructed three-colour printing surface (detail).

 

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.

Re-invention of historical technique. Polychromatic prints (on wall, 2013–14); Die polychrome Drukerei (book in vitrine, at left, 2014); sets of printing surfaces (in vitrine, 2011–13). All items conceived, designed/written, and produced by Pierre Pané-Farré, Leipzig.

Detail of sets of printing surfaces (laser-cut MDF). Surfaces show the residue of their last-printed colour(s).

Women in Type

Type Drawing Office of the Monotype Corporation in the 1920s. © Monotype

‘Women in type: a social history of women’s role in type-drawing offices, 1910–90’ is a new three-year research project now underway in the Department, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and led by Professor Fiona Ross. The project team includes Dr Alice Savoie and Dr Helena Lekka. For more information about this exciting and timely project, see the Leverhulme Trust’s newsletter for January 2018 (p. 11).

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.

Beyond awareness: inclusive design for Graphic Communication

This week, Part 2 Graphic Communication students completed the inclusive design component of their integrated design modules. Building on the series of workshops (see BdB blog) we did earlier in the term and relevant readings, on Monday, students presented seminar papers to their peers on particular aspects of inclusive design.

 

Group photo inclusive design

On Monday, our Graphic Communication students presented inclusive design seminars to their peers (from left to right): Jordan Bellinger, Lewis Burfield, Maciej Bykowski, Fenella Astley, Rajvir Bhogal, Stephanie Boateng, Cherise Booker, June Lin and (front) Jordan Cairns.

 

Students discussed and debated, aspects such as:

  • The principles of inclusive design and how designers can make these achievable in real life projects
  • How design briefs often tend to create segregation and how designers can develop more inclusive solutions to briefs
  • The clear print debate – what the guidelines are, who they are for and how implementing these can differ for professional designers and everyday communicators
  • The challenges and key considerations of inclusive design for screen – including the use of colour, images, sound and navigation
  • Key debates and typographic research for inclusive design for children’s reading, focusing on readers who may have dyslexia or visual impairments
  • Inclusive wayfinding – including challenges and innovative proposals for solutions in contemporary design practice.

Students commented that the inclusive design workshops, readings and seminars they have done have helped them become “more consciously aware” of how important it is to consider inclusive design in their own work and how designers may have to take responsibility for designing inclusively for a range of users. The highlighted how it is important to realise that the people they are designing for are probably “not the same as you (the designer)” and that inclusive design is “not just being aware” but about embedding inclusive practices in our industry. They also noted that these seminars had made them aware that there is “not enough research” about inclusive design within our discipline.

Information design, architecture and pharmacy: combating AMR

Competition

Calling small design practices, architects, information designers and pharmacists

Are you interested in how the design of space and information impacts on behavior and consumer choice? Do you want to work in public health and wellbeing? Do you want to develop research in practice? Are you up for the challenge of interdisciplinary work in the community?  

About our research project

How can architectural and information design help in the fight against anti-microbial resistance (AMR)?

Using principles of user-centred design, we are working with pharmacists and pharmacy workers to consider how to ‘improve the knowledge and understanding of antimicrobial resistance’. The AHRC-funded project ‘Information Design and Architecture in Persuasive Pharmacy Space: combating AMR’ (IDAPPS) aims to stimulate ideas for an engaging, inspirational, didactic information space to raise awareness of the dangers of anti-microbial resistance in a community pharmacy.

One of our research outputs is a competition and this is where we’d like your help. Competition teams will begin designing in our Ideas Lab, supported by a team of academics from information design, architecture, pharmacy, and human factors, as well as design and pharmacy practitioners.

Our pharmacy partner is Day Lewis and the winning design will be installed in a Day Lewis pharmacy for evaluation. Interested?

Get more information and how to enter a team for the competition here.

 

 

Professor Michael Twyman on forms design and the history of forms

(Cross posting from Centre for Information Design Research)

We are delighted to be able to point you to a video of one of a series of seminars for masters students and postgraduate researchers in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. The seminars, covering a range of topics, are given during the academic year by Professor Emeritus Michael Twyman.

This seminar focuses on the design of forms and its history, and draws together the Department’s research interests both in the history of printing and graphic communication and in the design of information for its users. The seminar demonstrates the use of material from collections and archives, which has been a key part of the Department’s approach to teaching and research since the 1970s.

We are grateful to the Friends of the University for funding the preparation of this recording.

Become a Design Star PhD student

We are now open for applications for PhD studentships through Design Star, one of the Centres for Doctoral Training funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

At Reading we have nine Design Star students working on a range of topics, including collections-based research on non-Latin typefaces and typography; maps and wayfinding in museums; the print industry and graphic design in the 20th century; decision-making for elderly care, and book design for people with early stage Alzheimer’s disease.

Design Star students benefit from working with other consortium students at Brighton, Loughborough, Goldsmiths and the OU, as well as external partners, to understand the ways in which design research interacts with many academic disciplines and walks of life. We aim to engage our doctoral researchers from the start and Rachel Warner commented on attending our induction event:

‘As a new student embarking on my research under the umbrella of Design Star, Friday’s Design Star event offered many opportunities to connect with fellow researchers and find out more about the diversity of experience and skills of all Design Star students. A workshop, organised by the student rep Jocelyn, culminated in group discussions about the range of research methods and research themes across our work, Design Star values and putting these in to practice, as well as Design Star current and future. New ideas and collaboration potential were evident from the animated conversations and wealth of ideas presented, exciting for a new researcher starting out, and providing huge potential for future collaborations’.

Find out how to apply:   www.designstar.org.uk

Celebrating with Coralie Bickford-Smith

We were delighted to see alumna Coralie Bickford-Smith receive an Honorary doctorate at last week’s graduation.

When she left Reading, Coralie worked for publishers on a freelance basis, and after a short stint with Quadrille Publishing, she went on to join Penguin where she made a name for herself as a highly-respected, award-winning book cover designer.

In her work at Penguin, Coralie has shown particular skill in creating covers for series of books, such as Penguin Pocket Classics, the Cloth-bound Classics and the Gothic Horror. Her skill lies in combining distinctive use of images and patterns, colours, and production processes that derive from understanding of traditional printing techniques. Through her work she has revived the tradition of the decorated cloth-bound book, but such that it has a modern-day feel.

Coralie has said that William Morris and William Blake have been inspired her work. However, it is William Blake –  with his immersive and integrative approach to book making –  that is best reflected in Coralie’s wonderful book that she authored and illustrated: The Fox and the Star. This compelling story and remarkable illustrations is thoroughly engaging for the reader and demonstrates book design skill at the highest level. For this work has won numerous awards including Waterstones Book of the Year in 2015 and The Academy of British Book Design prize in 2016.

We eagerly await the publication of her next book The worm and the bird.