Programme
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Thursday 31 May
9.30 Registration
10.20 Introduction
10.30 Ken Garland
My nominations for (relatively) unsung graphic design masters, 1950–2000
I have chosen five – it could have been fifteen – four of whom will be revealed only on the day; the fifth is Alfred Wainwright, the author, artist, designer and publisher of his ‘Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells’, and I hope the other four will understand if, given the limited time at my disposal, I give him the lion’s share of it. My choices are, of course, personal, but I hope to convince my hearers that they are well worthy of their consideration.
completed his studies in graphic design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, in the 1950s. He was Art Editor of Design magazine from 1956–62, when he left to establish his own graphic design studio as Ken Garland and Associates. Ken has written several books on design, contributed many articles to design periodicals in the UK, US, Europe and Japan, and has taught and lectured all over the world. His photographic work has been seen in a number of one-man exhibitions, the most recent being Metaphors, a portfolio of text and image (Brighton and Coventry, 2002, Hull, 2003, Glasgow and Portugal, 2004) and The children of Bangladesh/The rickshas of Bangladesh (Coventry and Reading, 2006).
11.30 Break
12.00 Amelia Noble and Frith Kerr (Kerr|Noble)
The new Old
Liberty of London packaging & press work by Kerr|Noble.
is a graphic design consultancy. Current and recent projects include: an identity for Konstam at the Prince Albert, a new restaurant in London designed by Thomas Heatherwick Studio; glass wall manifestations in collaboration with David Chipperfield Architects for Freshfields law firm in Amsterdam; exhibition graphics and wayfinding for the V&A’s Museum of Childhood; communications and marketing campaign for the 2007 season at Shakespeare’s Globe and Breakfast, Lunch, Tea , a cookery book on Rose Bakery for Phaidon.
‘Kerr|Noble turn the received wisdom on information design on its head. In the face of a graphic orthodoxy insisting that clarity thrives on the cool and impersonal, Kerr|Noble suffuse their designs with wit and idiosyncrasy.’ Emily King, Frieze Magazine
12.30 Morag Myerscough
studied graphic design at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1983–1986) and the Royal College of Art & Design (1986–1988). Morag set up her own cross-disciplinary design practice, Studio Myerscough, in 1993. The integration of design and its environment is central to Morag’s approach. It is a complete approach not controlled by labels and limitations. Her work is very eclectic: ‘challenges keep my design fresh and I am always open to the unexpected. I never approach a job with any preconceptions; it is important to find the best way to work on a project and not be constrained by set formulas from the outset. I relish in productive collaborations and trust’. She was admitted to the AGI in 2005.
1.00 Lunch
2.30 Max Gadney
The design of news online
The BBC News Website has undergone many iterations – all of them geared to helping its 5 million daily users find out about the world around them. How do you design for a mass audience? What should News look like? How is designing a living system different from creating one-off products?
oversees the design and user experience of BBC News’ digital services including the award-winning website. His team are responsible for both the product design and information graphics within the site. Max also helps out with the overall business strategy, product development and audience research.
3.00 Suw Charman
Blog beautiful, or: when will the visuals catch up with the text?
It has become easier and easier for people to publish their writing online as the web has matured. But something is missing: while blogs make it easy for almost anyone to express themselves in words, the same can’t be said for visual expression. Bloggers are free to choose themes or ‘skins’ that have been put together by HTML and CSS experts, but they can’t get any further without learning HTML and CSS for themselves. Are they really happy to use the same selection of mediocre designs or is it time for something better?
is a social software expert and blogger, specialising in the use of blogs and wikis in business. She writes about social software, the media, publishing, and other related subects at Strange Attractor (strange.corante.com, with her partner Kevin Anderson), and also keeps a personal blog, Chocolate and Vodka, (chocnvodka.blogware.com). Suw worked as a freelance web designer and project manager from 1998 to 2002, designing websites and intranet sites for companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Hutchison3G (now 3). She then ran her own internet start-up for two years before turning her passion for blogging into a successful consultancy.
3.30 Break
4.00 Tim Fendley
Legible cities
Showing how a designer’s art can make some sense of the city’s worst nightmares, this talk walks us through recent projects for Bristol, Milton Keynes and London.
is an information designer, creative director and founder of MetaDesign London and Applied Information Group. An interest in spaces, typography and how people think led to designing the award winning Bristol Legible City Initiative. He is currently engaged in designing a connected and unified system of wayfinding for London – the subject of a recent exhibition at New London Architecture.
4.30 Petra Černe Oven
New designing for new teaching
The Nuffield Foundation educational programmes brought fresh air into the publishing of mathematic and science books in 1960s. Close collaborations between the designers and editors resulted in unconventional approaches in delivering the knowledge, and teaching materials offered almost unlimited options for experimentations in the classroom.
is a graphic designer and writer. She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts, Department of Design, Ljubljana and has worked as a consultant for a diverse range of clients. She has received a Typographic Excellence Award from the Type Directors Club of New York. Petra has contributed articles to many publications including Eye, emzin, Typo, art.si, Hyphen and Klik. She is the ATypI country delegate for Slovenia and the founding member of the Brumen Foundation (Ljubljana). In 2004, she was awarded PhD at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where she currently works on ‘The optimism of modernity’, a research project with Paul Stiff.
5.00 Break
7.00 Gerard Unger
Re-reading Beatrice
The Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture
Beatrice Warde raised some questions in ‘The Crystal Goblet’ which have inspired me ever since reading that text as a student. She emphasised the invisibility of text faces, but she did not explain the phenomenon. That is something I have tried to do (among other things) in my book. This talk will re-examine The Crystal Goblet – a conversation with Beatrice, to bring her up to date. A completely new edition of my book on reading, Terwijl je leest, was published in 2006 and English, Italian and Spanish versions will be published this year. This event will conclude with the launch of the English edition, While you are reading, and the presentation of copies to St Bride Library and the University of Reading.
teaches as Visiting Professor in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, The University of Reading, UK. Until recently he also taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and in 2006 he became Professor of Typography at the University of Leiden. He has worked as a freelance designer since 1975 and has designed stamps, coins, magazines, newspapers, books, logos, corporate identities, annual reports and other objects, and many typefaces. In 1984 he was awarded the H.N.Werkman Prize for all his typographic work, for digital type designs in particular and for the way he reconciled technology and typographic culture. In 1988 he won the Gravisie-prijs for the concept of Swift, and in 1991 he was awarded the international Maurits Enschedé Prize for all his type designs.
Friday 1 June
10.00 Paul Rennie
British modernism 1941–51
Paul Rennie will describe how the graphic material and social transformations of this period confound the usual orthodoxies of a British resistance to modernism. In its British ‘comfy’ form, it might even be suggested that this modernism anticipates some of our contemporary concerns over sustainability and the environment.
is Head of Context in Graphic Design at Central St Martin’s, London. He and his wife Karen also have a shop and gallery, Rennies Seaside Modern, in Folkestone, Kent, that specialises in British modernism and the work of artist designers.
11.00 Rick Poynor
Motif magazine: making the world visible
Motif magazine, published in London from 1958 to 1967, displayed an openness towards all forms of visual expression that was unmatched by other publications of its day. Its creators, editor Ruari McLean and publisher James Shand, imagined a visually aware, non-specialist reader with broad enthusiasms, and Motif ’s ever-changing typography and page design reflected this eclecticism. The magazine presented meticulously researched and beautifully illustrated articles about painting, sculpture, art education, graphic design, typography and lettering, illustration, photography, architecture, wood-engraving, and the history of the graphic arts. Anticipating cultural developments that are taken for granted now, Motif made a notable contribution to the study of visual culture at a time when that culture was undergoing profound change.
was founding editor of Eye magazine from 1990 to 1997. He writes columns for Eye and for Print magazine, and he has covered design, media and visual culture for Blueprint, Icon, Frieze, I.D., Harvard Design Magazine, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. His books include Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991), Design Without Boundaries (1998), Typographica (2001) and No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003). In 2004, he was curator of the travelling exhibition ‘Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties’ at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. He is former visiting professor and now research fellow at the Royal College of Art, and he lectures widely about design matters in Europe, the US, Australia and China.
11.30 Break
12.00 Nick Robertson (WORDSALAD)
Stop making sense
Nick Robertson will present a selection of work by his company WORDSALAD and discussing how design can be considered as more than a means to an end, but as a pro-generator of more expansive work, taking it into other areas. Is there life after delivery?
has run the design company WORDSALAD for 10 years and works across many media from print to television. Recent projects include: ‘7 Million Paintings’ software and exhibitions and other work with Brian Eno; exhibitions, television, book jackets and the proposal for a new London monument with Peter Ackroyd; ‘Picture of Britain’, ‘Around the world in 80 Treasures’, ‘Francesco’s Italy and The Romantics’ with BBC arts and work with MTV, Warner Music, Virgin, Penguin books, ICA, Channel 4 and Real World records, to name but a few. He has clients all over the world and has recently set up a company (Lumen London) to explore the idea of published art.
12.30 Susanna Edwards
Lost to view
Susanna Edwards will be presenting an ongoing collaborative project generated with Katharina Koall and Martin McGrath. The project takes the form of a visual navigation through Iain Sinclair’s book London: city of disappearances (2006). Using words and images that provide a secret reading of London, and bringing together different media including illustration, photography, letterpress, drawing and animation in a digital presentation, the artists have illustrated selected references from the book which are linked to people, places, buildings, objects, memories, quotes and actions.
is an artist, designer and Academic Leader of design at London Metropolitan University. Her work often deploys traditional craft based and digital media from print to moving image. Clients/commissions/collaborations have included Baseline magazine, Grafik magazine, Paul Smith, Selfridges, Vintage Publishers, The British Library, The Great Eastern Hotel, The Museum of London, ICA, Tatty Devine, Tate Britain Iain Sinclair and currently The Science Museum.
1.00 Lunch
2.30 Carol Farr
Graphic divine: preaching with the pen in the Lindisfarne Gospels
Besides being stunningly beautiful, the Lindisfarne Gospels represent a spectacular achievement of design, expressing the authority of its text and the spiritual position of the scribe and artist, probably Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne (698–721). From a footing in British and Irish book design, he created innovative ensembles of decoration, using cutting-edge design techniques and media.
is an independent scholar based in London, who researches and writes about early medieval manuscripts, specialising in early gospel books. Her publications include The Book of Kells: its function and audience (1997) and Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Europe, co-edited with Michelle Brown (2001). Her interests focus on the uses of manuscripts in early medieval societies.
3.00 Martin Andrews
Passion for pattern: the designs of Owen Jones
Owen Jones was one of the most influential designers of the nineteenth century. His great work, The grammar of ornament, became a bible for generations of design students – he opened British eyes to the richness of pattern from other cultures. His contribution, however, went beyond fine bookwork and interior design culminating in the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, to the world of advertising and packaging. Drawing on the Huntley & Palmer and De la Rue archives at Reading University, this talk will focus on the stunning original artwork that Owen Jones produced for his pioneering packaging labels.
was for many years an exhibition and museum designer. He became a lecturer in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication in 1990 and in recent years has concentrated on printing history and the study of wood-engraving in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in 2003 he published a biography of Robert Gibbings. He is curator of the Department’s printing collections and Deputy Director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies.
3.30 Break
4.00 Patrick Walker (Dust collective)
A return to the private press
A return to the private press, although a nod in the direction of the traditions of print, is about combining the means of production with a design studio environment. This has helped to develop and nurture practice beyond the educational establishment from where the passion was born but not left behind.
studied Graphic Arts and Design at Leeds Metropolitan University. Following several years in industry and academia he went on to set up the Sheffield art/design collective Dust in 2000. Since then Dust has produced, amongst other things, design and illustration for a wide range of commercial and arts based projects. www.studio-dust.com
4.30 Michael C. Place (Build)
Love, life & graphic design
I love graphic design. I can’t think of anything else that I could do. I hate graphic design. 16 years/5840 days/140640 hours/8409600 minutes/504576000 seconds and counting, it’s all about detail, it’s a craft, I can’t switch off… It’s an obsession, graphic design is an obsession for me. A presentation of both commissioned and self-initiated small, medium & large projects, completed by Build.
was founded in 2001 by Michael C. Place and Nicky Place and has since established itself as a studio with an almost obsessive attention to detail. Build is Michael, Nicky, Brockmann & Betty. Build Print With Love. www.designbybuild.com
5.00 Break
6.30 Dave Farey’s typographic quiz, followed by the conference party
Demonstrators
John Neilson and Emma Lavender
Lettercarving
John Neilson was born in 1959. After a spell as a busker in Spain then several years as a language teacher, he retrained as a calligrapher at Roehampton, then spent a year as assistant to lettercarver Tom Perkins, setting up his own lettercarving workshop back on the Welsh border in 1992. Work runs the gamut from practical commissions for architectural lettering, signs, plaques and memorials to the interpretation of poetic texts in a semi-sculptural way, with lettering design central to all of it. John also does some typography and book design, teaches workshops in lettercarving and lettering design, and edits the Letter Exchange journal Forum.
Emma Lavender, after a previous life, also retrained, but specifically in carving stone: any kind of carving in any kind of stone. However, she has a particular love of letters, and much of her work is thus oriented. She retrained at City & Guilds of London School of Art, re-learning her alphabet, and there received instruction and guidance on the carving of letters in stone from James Salisbury. Since then she has largely worked independently on commission.
John and Emma will be demonstrating lettercarving during the conference and encouraging you to give it a try.
Richard Lawrence
Letterpress printing
Richard Lawrence has been printing for the last 30 years. Most of his work is ephemeral. He gives printing demonstrations and runs occasional practical classes in Bath where he lives. Recently Richard has been working with Stanley Donwood who designs for Radiohead – he editioned the linocuts that appear on Thom Yorke’s solo album Eraser.
For this conference Richard hopes to involve delegates in the production of a commemorative poster using some of the resources of the St Bride Library.
Douglas Bevans
Bookbinding
Paul Antonio
Calligraphy
Paul Antonio trained as a Calligrapher, Gilder and Heraldic Artist with a specialism in historical materials and techniques. He also studied Letterform History, Palaeography and Archaeological Illustration (specialising in Hieroglyphic Illustration and Ancient Writing Systems). Paul runs a studio in London, England and takes on calligraphic commissions, teaches classes and lectures at museums and universities. He is also the archaeological illustrator at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.
The demonstrations will look at modern and historical letterforms and the many ways to create them using traditional and non-traditional tools and techniques from quills to brushes to beer cans.
Exhibitors
Bryan Loke
Bryan is a designer living in London. Since completing his studies at London College of Printing, he has been working freelance and initiating graphic/art projects. For the 2007 St Bride conference Bryan has attempted to capture the spirit of great British design from a London perspective using a series of 10 images. The images are online at http://www.bryanloke.com
Random
A selection of postcards from the Random Project that say something about Britishness. The Random Project called for typographically-led responses to randomly-asigned words. This was a project that was open to all and the postcards have been created by participants from as far afield as Russia, Brazil, India and the US.
http://www.random-project.co.uk | http://www.flickr.com/photos/random-project
Agata Wycichowska
Agata Wycichowska is a freelance writer and graphic designer based in London. She graduated from London College of Printing last year where she studied BA typo / graphic design. For this year’s St Bride Conference she collaborated with Bryan Loke and is exhibiting two A2 posters with the copy ‘Great British Design’, on one poster set in Helvetica and one poster set in Gill. The Helvetica poster is digitally printed, the Gill poster is letterpress and exists in a limited edition of 50 copies.
http://www.agatawycichowska.com
Conference sponsors
