Luke Wilhelmi

After-class/term drinks at Cooper’s with some of the Type@Cooper crowd last week. Wish I had remembered to bust out the camera earlier so as to have gotten more people.

We joke about the workshop being a ‘break’, but while quite the whirlwind experience, it was a nice release of energy to play with these new faces and have a little fun with the limitations in both time & construction.

Here’s a shot from Monday’s public guest lecture by Jerry Kelly on Hermann Zapf’s typefaces. A lot of great slides of sketches and stories. One thing that surprised me was Zapf’s exploration into a Cherokee typeface with Chief Sequoya? I’ll have to look into it further, looked fascinating. Be sure to mark your calendars for the next in the Herb Lubalin lecture series: March 18th, when Sumner Stone gives his talk The Tao of Hand and Eye: Exploring the dynamics of formal and informal letterforms. Also check out Jerry Kelly’s book The Art of the Book in the Twentieth Century.

After class, a group went out for hummus and type talk with visiting first-year Type@Cooper alum Thomas Jockin.

Monday’s lecture class started with a visit from Dan Rhatigan (@ultrasparky) of Monotype, with a selection of yesteryear type-process material. Dan was great in explaining the role these different documents held in the development of some very famous typefaces (such as some great Gill Sans sketches). In this era of saving multiple backups every other edit, it was mind blowing seeing a single paper with the mechanical being used as reference for decades. I was also struck by how seemingly tiny details were scrutinized with much difficulty using analogue tools (such as the slight bowing of outer verticals to counteract the invariable twist of the metal during impact), while other large aspects were left completely open to interpretation by workers at the final stages, such as the diacritics. The pieces are from the Monotype UK archives, and should be part of a show soon if I remember correctly?

Second week, table critiques. Refining our ideas for the typeface we will work on for the rest of the program. No pressure.

Paul Shaw talking about Oswald Cooper on Monday, part of Type@Cooper’s Herb Lubalin Lecture Series (free to the public! Check out the next one on March 4)