Things We Don’t Have In France: Burger King

As a lot of people requested it, here is the shameful truth: there is no Burger King in France.
National tragedy.

Voyage au bout de la nuit

Last Saturday after Gerry visited us for a macbook party, Yvonne, Michi, Simi & I decided to have a drink in a pub. But Saturday 11pm is out of time in Reading. Sad pubs, closed ones, loud music, limited entrance, locked doors, hot Brit chicks, cold, vomit flacks, uk ID card, nurses and angels leaded us to dangerous initiatory travel through the local nightlife.
3 hours of errancy later we were back home without having drunk anything, but changed forever.

Things We Don’t Have In France: Expressive Typography Road Signs

Grrr.

Joehoe

Picture by Yvonne

On Wenesday Santa Claus brought us a lot of chocolate and clementines plus some awesome letter badges nicknames.
Dank u wel Sinter Klaaske!

Things We Don’t Have In France: Peanuts Butter Kit Kat Chunky

Oui, c’est bien un Kit Kat Chunky au beurre de cacahouète…

GU on WAD, Hurray

Gerard Unger is with us again this week! Beside our full time but colourful typeface design sessions with him, he offered us a couple of lectures, all great… as expected. On Tuesday he told us about one of his many personal heroes: the amazing puppet maker William Addison Dwiggins. His enthusiasm about Dwiggins' skilful freshness became even more communicative as we were looking at some of his books designs from the Gerry’s collection.
More on Dan’s blog.

Matthew Was There!

Ou, l’homme au catogan

Thanks to Gerry, we got invitations to a lecture given by Matthew Carter at the RSA in London.
After some exciting adventures in a unmoving train we finally got there right in time to attempt the show. With emotion we listen too him going through a presentation of some of his emblematic works, explaining with clarity, humour and elegance what ‘hardcore’ typography is. Simon Esterson was there to lead the discussion.

What a nice groupie audience
But a night in London is way longer than a typographic lecture, and, after we enjoyed the glass(es) of wine the event sponsors really wanted us to drink, we had a wonderful magic time in the City, crossing bridges, having diner, jogging over the river, wagga mamming, gossiping in different languages and a lot more fun!
Yvonne and her gansta camera where there too…

Michael Twyman on Cinema Magazines

Manu looking at Cinémonde.
This week Michael Twyman told us about Cinema magazines, Art Déco, photogravure printing & world/pictures relationship. It appears that ‘photogravure’ has a rather different meaning in English than in French: the English term refers a very specific printing process based on metallic cylinder while the French one concerns the general prepress processing. Despite this little quiproquo we all enjoyed a lot these gorgeous pieces of printing.
Curiously there is nothing about that yet on Michi’s Flicker…

Mid-Week-Pictorial issues

Non-Latin Session: Day 2

Devanagari lettering (picture by Paul Hunt).
After the theoretical session on Tuesday we started practising North Indian scripts today. Some lettering exercises, with various tools, let us identify the different signs, getting a writing comprehension of the shapes and a better understanding of the letter combination systems.
Fiona shared her amazing experience with us, kindly criticising our sketches with precious and accurate advices.
Enjoy a more enjoyable overview –free beer included– on Dan’s blog!

It’s Devanagari, Paul is happy.

«The Three Is The One Which Looks Like a Two!»

Today was the first day of the Non-Latin workshop about North Indian scripts. Fiona Ross gave us an efficient overview of each major writing systems used in North Indian –including Devanagari, Bengali & Gujarati– always linked to past and current technological limitation and a vast amount of local documents.

The goal of the week is to demonstrate to us a way to approach Non-Latin typeface design, confidence and questioning documentation seems to be key issues according to Fiona. By the way, it appeared the the ratio of available good typefaces per Indian reader is kind of low… unlike the number of photocopied sheets we got to cover the subject.

Things We Don’t Have In France: Cleaning Spiders

Some strange cybernetic creatures are wandering around in the departement.

Michael Twyman on 17th French Manuscripts

As usual Michael Twyman gave us an amazingly well documented talk about French manuscripts yesterday, looking for a way to qualify average 17th century French writing.
Some very intersting statements were made about document safety and some amazingly skilled kids were been jealous of…

17th century fun.

Gerry’s Collective Crit Session On Early Typeface Designs

No Black Friday in the department!

Thanksgiving Massive Shopping

Thanks to Dan Reynolds’ enthusiasm we were involved in a huge thanksgiving celebration last night. Although we were European newcomers, Joke, Yvonne & I quickly got the core idea of the event and, like everybody, spent several hours in Tesco, buying everything you need to kill hunger.
Fortunately there is no picture of the way back home, too much food on too small bikes.

A lot more on Dan’s and Joke’s blogs, guest starring a wonderfully cooked turkey and a lot of love embedded in some delightful dishes from all over the world (some mothers were involved!).

Michael Twyman on Puffin Books

Weeks after weeks, the Michael Twyman show & tell sessions are going on, always new and exiting.
Guest staring blurry Paul, Fernando, Andrew & ghosty Gareth.
A lot more on Michi's Flickr, as usual.

Skillfull Supermarket Home Delivery

Manu, Yvonne & I performed a Tesco Online Shopping last week. It seems badly designed website, non native speakers and tired students can lead to such funny things as a single green bean home delivered.
Only 2p! Such a good deal! Thank you Mister Tesco!
Picture by Yvonne.

Things We Have In France Too: User Friendly Postal Architecture.

You must really love books to go to grab them at the Reading Royal Mail Head-quarters.
I guess Yvonne & I are considered as true Amazonian adventurers now…

Love At Foxhill

Gwen was in Reading this weekend! Je t’aime mon amour!

Thank you everybody for all the midnight balloons, the lovely Hand Job Books, the graffiti cacedédi, les colis mystère encore à Paris, the special Pez candies, les écharpes, Weng Weng, the Typotheque gogogirls forever love cards dairies, the fcbk walls, the indian dinners, the party commers, the French Oreos, the msn Greets, les Bacot Geeks Challenges, the suprise cakes and so on, and on and on…
Merci beaucoup!
Love!

Improvised (?) Birthday Dinner

Chef’s choice with Yvonne, Joke, Michi, Paul and Manu! Thank you chaps!

Things We Don’t Have In France: BK's Onion Rings

Spécial dédicace. But they close at 9pm, perfection is an unreachable illusion.

Shopping…

Upgrade, lighter wallet & full Hard drive!

Michael Twyman on Monograms

Unfortunately, Michael Twyman was not abble to give us one of his weekly lovely show & tell sessions today. Here is a cellphone picture of the last week one, about cyphers and monograms.
Guest starring fellow MAs Andrew (researcher) & Paul (type designer). A lot more on Michi's Flickr.

Things We Have In A Fancy Place In Paris.

Dan brought Michi, Dan, Anke & myself to a lovely Brazilian restaurant/grocery/salon de thé today. We enjoied a very nice meal and des bières trops mortelles.
Almost feel like home!

Phileas Fogg Pop World Tour

What a Reading typical day: Brazilian late lunch, American movies, Arabic news paper, Indian take away dinner, pfiou.

Things We Don’t Have in France: Giant Sized Glasses of Coke

And guess what, it’s free refill!
Gansgter picture by Michi ‘Scoots’ Hochleitner.

First Unger Week

«always go to extrem!»
(it’s easy to make some step backs)
Last week Gerard Unger was visiting the department for the first time. He came with a new Unger Method: a dense 4 days work session, experimenting with the design of a very condensed typeface.

First sketches, never condensed enough.

I explored five direction by sketching, reducing, reducing again, reducing more, composing words and going back to sketch. Then the experiment keeps going on FontLab with digitalised forms and printouts.

Picture by Dan ‘TypeOff’ Reynolds.
The use of computer allowed us to to explore the automatic extansion of typeforms as a design process. We all made some really surprising and exiting statements about the realtion of body size, x-height, wideness and optical sizes. The following pictures show some tex set with exactly same body and x-height !


Thanks to Gerard I learned a lot, both from my own design and those of my classmates!
Dan Reynolds and Paul Hunt made some more detailled ‘english native speaking’ reports on their own blog.

French Joke

Italian restaurants have some strange names in Reading.

27 Days Later (or the True First Message)

I am in Reading–UK since the October the 1st and I finaly stoped procrastinating and set up my own blog. Yeah.
Some ‘Back To The Future’ posts are planed to tell my first days in the MATD at the Typography and Graphic Comunication Departement of the UoR (A non-default template is also on the go!).
Picture by Yvonne ‘Ysch’ Schüttler, hallowen cupcakes by Dan ‘ultrasparky’ Rhatigan.