AEPM 2015 conference announcement

The next AEPM conference
will be on the theme of

The relevance of typographical collections for today’s designers

 

dates: 2-3 October 2015

place: the fabulous Tipoteca italiana (Cornuda, Italy).

The theme of the conference

Who cares about about outmoded letterpress techniques in the digital âge? Old machines and metal type are nice to look at, but do they serve any real purpose? Do they have anything to say to us today? Why should museums worry about preserving them and the traditional skills which they represent?

Designers are in the business of constantly reinventing the visual world in which we live. They do it by combining letters, images and white space to produce hand-crafted mass produced products. One of the essential raw materials of graphic design is type. And one of the principal sources of type as a raw material is history – the history of type design and type-based printing processes. Why does type look the way it does? What makes it work? Why are types different? How does type relate to technological, economic and cultural change?

Printing museums preserve the artefacts and the traditional skills of typography. As such, they are a key to understanding the history and uses of type; a means of understanding what is new and what remains the same in type-based communication as it confronts massive technological change; a prism through which graphic designers can look at an industrial, cultural and technical activity which helped forge the modern world. As such, printing museums are a vital resource for designers.

The conference will look at the many ways in which typographical collections can be used (and are used) by graphic designers and all those interested in the development of graphic communication.

Speakers will include

Phil Baines (Central Saint Martins, London, UK) – graphic designer, author, teacher and co-curator with Catherine Dixon of the Central Lettering Record.

James Clough (Milan, Italy) – designer, calligrapher, author, curator of Mondovì Printing Museum and the printing section of the Fabriano Paper Museum.

Matthieu Cortat (Museum of printing and graphic communication, Lyon, France)type designer, cultural mediator.

Catherine Dixon (Central Saint Martins, London, UK) – graphic designer, author, teacher, co-curator with Phil Baines of the Central Lettering Record, and conference and event organiser for the St. Bride Library.

Neil Harris (University of Udine, Italy) professor of bibliography and library studies.

Jim Moran (Hamilton Wood Type Museum, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, United States) – printer, museum director, letterpress teacher.

Bill Moran (Hamilton Wood Type Museum, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, United States) – printer, artistic director, letterpress printer, graphic designer and professor of printing history.

Riccardo Olocco (Free university of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy) – graphic designer, teacher.

Edwin Pickstone (Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, UK) typographer, designer in charge of Glasgow School of Art’s leterpress workshop.

More information here.