Birmingham’s Typographic Hub has revealed a new series of Type Talks for this upcoming year, with a craft-focused line-up not to be missed by any typography aficionados out there.
With a proud typographic heritage, John Baskerville’s home city of Birmingham isn’t going to let London have all the fun when it comes to type-related events in 2015. Part of the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design at Birmingham City University, Typographic Hub has just revealed a line-up of free talks on lettering and typography, with a refreshing emphasis on craft.
Highlights include Joby Carter, who will talk on the art of sign-writing. Almost unbelievably, Carter grew up surrounded by his family’s vintage funfair where he became apprenticed to the master signwriter working for the fair. He now specialises in lettering and signs, runs intensive five day courses in the trade and restores vintage fairground rides in order to make sure the art and craft of Victorian signwriting isn’t lost.
There aren’t many people who can claim to have been the last member of a guild originally set up by Eric Gill in 1921, to have spent several years living as a Benedictine monk or to have worked for Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Centre – an institution largely responsible for the computer user interfaces we are familiar with today. But remarkably, calligrapher Ewan Clayton has done all three. He now co-directs Sunderland University’s International Calligraphy Research Centre and his talk, The Golden Thread, will certainly be one to catch.
Further talks feature Gordon Young, creator of the ISTD-winning typographical pavement in Blackpool known as the Comedy Carpet and John Neilson, a letter carver who will explain why, despite the technology that could put him out of a job, he still has a desire to painstakingly design and carve a custom alphabet for each project.
For a full calendar of events see typographichub.org/diary.