Stephen Barrett – Page 2 – Researching, Reading, Reflecting

Intervention: week 4

During the fourth week students continued to refine and develop their designs, simultaneously considering:

– Knowledge Exchange (how they were using new technical and theoretical knowledge)

– Influence from the Western canon

– Aspects of their source of identity

It was interesting to observe how students were managing this and talking with them helped me to understand their design process and their reflections on diversity and decolonialism.

We were again joined by Eleni who continued to talk through more advanced aspects of type design and some of Dalton Maag’s projects. She also talked about the bias towards latin script typefaces (presumably fueled by dominance of English-speaking countries, commerce, development of design industry in Europe, etc). What this leads to is a lack of diversity in the availability and sophistication of non-latin typefaces. This fed nicely in to the project about diversity and decolonisation.

Intervention: week 3

In week 3 we were joined by two designers from Dalton Maag to talk more to the students about typeface design and industry standard software Glyphs. The students took their vector designs into Glyphs where they could now look at metric spacing and other typographic-specific features.

The two designers gave feedback to the students one a one-to-one basis and I was also able to give feedback and join discussions and observe conversations with students about their ideas and how they had been implementing aspects of their identity and the Western design canon in their designs.

Intervention: week 2

Week 2 we were joined by Eleni Beveratou, Creative Director at Dalton Maag to provide students with specialist teaching, technical and theoretical knowledge about typeface design.

This enabled students to develop and refine their designs and they started drawing digitally in Adobe Illustrator to create vector outlines of their typefaces.

Presentation by Eleni Beveratou, Creative Director at Dalton Maag

Eleni also provided design reviews and feedback sessions for the students in small groups (approx six students).

Student project using clay models as a starting point

Students working on their designs in Adobe Illustrator

Vector outline design, developed and refined from earlier hand-drawn sketches

Intervention: week 1 sketches

Some of the results of the students’ initial designs. These were purposefully kept to pencil drawings / sketches so the students could work on ideas roughly and quickly, trace over the printed specimens if they wished to and experiment.

Intervention: Type specimens from the Western canon

I also provided printouts of seminal typefaces from the Western canon (relating to my overview lecture at the beginning of the session. Students were asked to choose one of these to analyse and use as a reference / influence along with their identity image.

The idea here was to consider how they might use ‘knowledge’ from the Western design canon: visual characteristics, proportion etc.

The pdf document of these type specimens can be found here.

Week 1: Sources of identity

Pre-task
Prior to the first session, students were asked to consider an aspect of their own identity and to find an image (ideally typographic/lettering) that represents this.

These were brought to the first session and students uploaded to a Padlet that I had created to document the intervention.

This had the added advantage of becoming a communal resource for students throughout the five-week teaching block.

Overview of Padlet created for the intervention

Examples of sources of identity images that students brought in

Images that students brought in ranged from art and design references, to family heritage, non-latin language systems, images of nature and ecology, indigenous knowledge, music and pop culture.

Intervention: week 1 slides

At the start of the session, I introduced the project and gave a short lecture on The Western canon of typeface design, plotting the development of typefaces from Gutenberg to the present day. This gave the students a historical overview of the subject (from a Western perspective).

Week 1 slides can be found here.

Intervention: brief

In GCD Practices we refer to briefs as ‘tasks’. The task sheet for my intervention can be found here.

Participant Information Sheet & Participant consent form

Before I begin the intervention I have prepared a participant information sheet and Participant consent form and handed these out to students to sign and give approval to participate in my research intervention.

These documents can be found here:

Participant Information Sheet

Participant consent form

Intervention overview

This week I am starting my intervention which takes the form of a curricula change to a type design project that I ran last year.

I will be teaching a five-week block on Typeface design. The main change I am making is to ask the students to start by finding an image that represents an aspect of their identity that they are comfortable using as a starting point or influence for their typeface design. We will also look at the Western typeface design canon.

During weeks 2–4 of the teaching block I have invited in leading International type design studio Dalton Maag to teach specialist design skills, techniques, theory and industry standard software.

The students will be designing their own typefaces based on an apsect of their identity, a typeface selected from the Western canon, and using new technical and theoretical knowledge from Industry professionals (Knowledge Exchange).