Type Horizons-Birmingham

Speakers include

John D Berry, Seattle, USA | Hand-held typography: The typographic horizon has expanded from paper to screens of all kinds. Some of those screens are quite tiny – hand-held devices, netbooks, phones – and often the type is not static but in motion. Although a lot of attention has been paid to the rendering of fonts on the screen, we’ve only begun to explore how they are used – i.e. the typography of onscreen reading. We read long text on the screen all the time: when that screen is held in our hand, what does that mean for typography?

Henrik Birkvig, Copenhagen, Denmark | Type quality++ The talk is based on my master dissertation and aims to widen the concept of type and font quality from a practical/technical flavoured matter to also encompassing circumstances regarding the professional designer (who chooses a font for a specific job) and to insights into the way recipients can be expected to perceive typeface signals.

Typographics, London, UK | Type rules! Typographic communication draws on a wealth of social, geographic and historical contexts, underpinning our highly versatile and robust 26-letter alphabet. Its ability to convey meaning is infinite. In the public eye, the contribution of typography is well established, but with the ever-increasing role of new media, we want to explore how to take typography forward. This is an illustrated discussion involving the audience.

Will Hill, Cambridge, UK | Spaces between; spaces within: The paper explores the concept of negative space and counterform, relating the ‘counters’ and negative forms in type design to wider concepts of negative space in architecture, fine art and critical theory. The paper will consider the resonance of enclosed space in Neolithic ‘holed stones’ such as the Men-an-Tol in West Penwith, Cornwall, and the influence of these forms upon the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, in turn a key influence upon the letterforms of contemporary lettercutter Tom Perkins.

Marcus Leis Allion, Brighton, UK | Reinscribing typography: In this paper I will present the emergence of the horizon that has not only transformed typography but also heralds its departure. That evolutionary horizon is the liquefying order of code. While the invention of the moveable type introduced a vast array of typographic variants and styles they all nonetheless maintain an (often unreflexive) allegiance to its technological axioms: modularity and the grid.

David Osbaldestin, Birmingham, UK | From blackboard to Baskerville: To a knowledge hungry undergraduate student typography is often overwhelming in its sheer might and volume, where does one make a start? Yet through practice it is an immersive and rewarding subject, an essential and sophisticated graphic language in the vocabulary of an emergent creative.This paper explores an alternative approaches in typographic study through experience based practice in animation.

John Rooney, Salford, UK | Visible narratives: This project is created from digital recordings of the gesture. A Visible Narrative is the unseen path created by the pattern of gesture we make during the moment language. This is a deliberate strategy to place the focus of the viewer on images created from the silent visual chaos of narration. The images presented are captured using Adobe Flash and appear on the surface to be without meaning. However the path of the gesture is encoded within the images.