Isotype children’s books on the Eye blog
Examples from the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection.
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Typeform dialogues
Hyphen Press Extra has today posted – free to download – a document that gathers materials from the Typeform dialogues project, carried out by Eric Kindel, Catherine Dixon, and others at Central St Martins, London, in 1994–8 and afterwards.
Return to Prague
Following an invitation by the very active Petra Dočekalová of TypoSemestr, Gerry Leonidas will give a lecture at the Tranzit Gallery in Prague on Monday 26 November. The lecture will be followed by a two-day workshop on Greek type design, in the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design.
(The trip is timed perfectly to pick up some issues of the latest TYPO magazine, which is full of Reading connections!)
Chancellor presents student design prizes
Over the summer BA Graphic Communication students who has just finished their first year entered a competition run organised by Oculus, a Reading design company who are celebrating their 20th anniversary. The students were asked to create a brand for a fictional company and to deliver both visuals and a written rationale of the thinking behind their idea.
Earlier this month the top ten entries were displayed at an awards ceremony hosted by Oculus and prizes were presented by the Chancellor, Sir John Madejski, to the three winners Mike Leonard (1st place), Bethan Prestwich (3rd place), and Emily Whiteside (2nd place).
Pencils to Pixels, and more
The University is a partner in the Pencil to Pixel exhibition which opened yesterday in the Metropolitan Wharf, in Wapping. After the taster of Gill’s drawings seen in Beauty in the Making last spring, Monotype pulled out all the stops for Pencil to Pixel: the event marks the first public viewing of many materials from the archives in Salfords, from original drawings by Bruce Rogers and Chris Brand, to an unbound folio masterpiece of Modern typography belonging to Adrian Frutiger, to an innovative display taking over the entirety of one of the walls, displaying a never-reccurring combination of typeforms from the company’s library. The exhibition is accompanied by twelve “collections” (booklets showcasing themed selections of typefaces by Abbott Miller, Patrick Burgoyne, and others), and a range of specimens and keepsakes.
The exhibition marks the publication of two major editions: a new issue of the Recorder, celebrating Robin Nicholas’ career in the company (with an opening article by Gerry Leonidas), and a special issue of Eye magazine, dedicated to the contributions of Monotype to type and typography. Both editions include superb photography, and should become instantly collectable – not least because the material in the exhibition is unlikely to be made available in this scale anytime soon.
There are many Reading connections with the exhibition, starting with the main organisers: Dan Rhatigan and James Fooks-Bale are both graduates of the Department. The special Recorder issue follows on from the Centenary Issue of 1997, published on the occasion of the ATypI conference in Reading; and the Linotype the Film publicity on display sports the exquisite (but unreleased, yet) redesign of Metro by another graduate, Toshi Omagari. Not least, the Recorder includes a picture of Robin teaching a few years back in a room eerily similar to the studio where Book- and Information Design postgraduates spend their days!
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?
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