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things We Don’t Have In France: Feathered Students

I just realised that the ‘Things We Don’t Have In France’ series might be read as cynical way to mock United Kingdom or express a more than very doubtful French primacy. It is absolutely not. No irony there, England rocks (so does France, once in a while, and a truckload lot of other countries anyway).
Here is the evidence: we have wonderful swans swimming over the lake in the campus. And as the year goes on we are getting really good friends. We’ll soon chat with them as we daily cross the bridge to get some Student Union Magic Sandwich Deals.

Michael Twyman on Non-Latin Books

I now need a little help from my thesaurus to keep on saying how Mychael Twyman’s sessions are great. And that week –28 January– it was slpendiferous, as usual.
Note that you have an opportunity to see the almost complete crew of the MA Typeface design students on the picture, we just missed Yvonne. And guess what? We had two guests! Seb et popsy étaient dans la place. Clin d’œil les mec.

Greek Week!

Here it was, inevitable, fascinating, gorgeous, famous: the week long Greek workshop!

Gerry started with a quick but deep and dense overview of the history of Greek typography by showing us some amazing pieces of printed matters from his collection, from 16th century (and earlier) to present days

Garamond’s Grecs du Roi, printed by Henri Estienne in 1591
in Dionis Cassii Romanarum Historiarum.
Didot’s Greek in Hymne d’Aristote à la vertue, 1832.
We also reviewed digital typefaces and explored some former students workfiles. Then came the writing and sketching time, and we quickly ended with some draft digital versions we could talk about.

First printout on day 3. A lot of thing to do and more to come, I promise (maybe).
What a fantastic week! Our understanding of Greek, Greek type, and Greek history got of course a lot greater. So did our understanding of type design and typography themselves. I now fully realise the importance of seeing things rather than pictures of things. We all got a pretty strong demonstration that type has to be taught and seen in its context, in relation with its history and the history of languages and culture. The whole approach of multi-script type family as system of relationships get now even more exiting and challenging, opening new routes for the Latin design itself. Yoohoo.
Read more on your usual story dealer.

Michael Twyman on Pop Up Books

The ‘Monday’ saga goes on and on. On the 21 January, Michael Twyman shown us his pop up books collection. Again amazing stuff and gorgeous lecture, unfortunately Dan and I were not good enough to save the poor lady above. Condolences.

Spéciale dédicace Valentine, you are not alone.
Picture by Michi

One Laptop Per Grown Up (?) Kid

In the beginning of January, Dave brought his XO laptop in the department. Some aspects are maybe disappointing (or free) but we all got quite excited about the ‘one laptop per child’ machine and some of its really cool features such as a pretty smart screen luminosity/definition management and a cheap robustness.
Thank you Dave for bringing us in the heart of hot technology! We are now waiting for Gerry’s future Macbook Air (or Michi's desired iPhone) to compare. More on TypeOff, of course.