Typography: from brain to media, Beatrice Warde Memorial Lecture May 15, 2008

Thursday 15 May 2008, 6.30pm in the Bridewell Hall
Entry to the lecture is free and all are welcome

. . . . .

Designers think for a living, but nobody is interested in our thoughts.
All they want is the physical manifestations of our thought process.
Sketches, dummies, layouts, mark-ups, pilots, presentations, print-outs,
soft proofs, touch-and-feel, wireframes – whatever it takes to show what
the ‘real’ piece may look like.
As a typographer in the 60s and 70s, we had to prepare our ideas for
other people: typesetters, printers, programmers, colleagues, client.
Exact instructions, pasted-up elements or ‘original art’ were our final
product.

This will be a trip down memory lane and onto the shop floor of
forgotten techniques and technology that may offer insights in how we
work and what could perhaps be improved. And an attempt at suggesting
how to use our brains better – still the most powerful tool around.

Erik Spiekermann is author, information designer and typographer. He
founded MetaDesign and FontShop, is Honorary Professor at the University
of the Arts in Bremen and has an honorary doctorship from Pasadena Art
Center. In 2003 he received the Gerrit Noordzij Award from the Royal
Academy in Den Haag and in 2007 he was the first designer to be elected
into the Hall of Fame by the European Design Awards for Communication
Design. Later that year he was named Honorary Royal Designer for
Industry by the RSA in Britain. Some of his typefaces, among them FF
Meta and ITC Officina, are considered modern classics. He lives and
works in Berlin, London and San Francisco. His studio,
SpiekermannPartners, presently employs some 30 designers.