Four Approaches to Typography

Featuring globally acclaimed local and international practitioners, the third in a series presented in collaboration with RMIT Design Futures Lab, this day-long symposium will explore contemporary developments in type design and typography. Featuring keynote presentations by: Radim Peško, London; Sara De Bondt, Amsterdam; Mia Frostner and Robert Sollis of Europa, London; Vincent Chan, Melbourne; and Catherine Griffiths, Auckland.

Presented by the RMIT Design Futures Lab and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Speakers

Sara De Bondt
Now based in Antwerp, Sara De Bondt was born in Leuven in Belgium. Her interest in visual culture began at a young age. Her parents dragged Sara along to see things of a cultural nature on family holidays and this sparked her interest in visual culture and also in making things. De Bondt graduated from Sint-Lukas Brussel, Brussels, Belgium, in 1999, and Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2002. Sara De Bondt studio was set up in London in 2003. Sara works on many and varied projects that include identities, books, magazines, websites and exhibitions.

Radim Peško
Radim Peško is a graphic designer based in London. His work focuses on typography, type and editorial design as well as occasional exhibition and publishing projects. He is a visiting lecturer at ÉCAL Lausanne, among other schools, and is founder of RP digital type foundry. His work includes an identity for Secession Vienna, and catalogues for Moravian Gallery in Brno among others. He has been a contributor to Dot Dot Dot magazine and has taught at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

Robert Sollis, Europa
Europa is a graphic design studio based in London, run by Mia Frostner and Robert Sollis, both graduates of the Royal College of Art. Europa create visual identities, books and publications, exhibition design, signage, art direction, editorial design and websites. Alongside their studio practice, Europa run the second year of the BA Graphic Design course at Camberwell College of Arts. (Mia Frostner was previously scheduled to also appear).

Vincent Chan
Vincent Chan is a graphic designer who specialises in type design and a PhD candidate at Monash University. His research is concerned with forms of design practice that embrace a speculative position towards the conditions and nature of the discipline. To this end, he is interested in pedagogical frameworks that address and promote this enquiry. He teaches at Monash University and RMIT University and proposes typefaces and pedagogical projects under the moniker Matter of Sorts.

Catherine Griffiths
Catherine Griffiths (b.1966) is a designer and typographer whose practice moves across graphic design, self-publishing, installations in public and private spaces, and writing. She is active in the international design community, and an advocate for alternative thinking. Selected projects include the Wellington Writers Walk, a series of large-scale concrete text sculptures (2002, 2004), the curation and co-organisation of TypeSHED11, Wellington (2009), the visual brand for Parlour: women, equity, architecture, and her ongoing Vowel series. AEIOU—Constructed/Projected was presented at Typojanchi 2015. Her work is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and the National Hangeul Museum (Seoul). She has exhibited in New Zealand, Chile, France, USA, and Korea.

Moderator
Associate Professor Brad Haylock
Brad Haylock is a designer, publisher and academic. He is an Associate Professor of Design in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is program manager of the Master of Communication Design and co-director of the Design Futures Lab research group. His research interests span book typography, independent publishing and sociologies of critique. He is founding editor of Surpllus, an independent, para-academic publisher of books focusing on critical and speculative practices across art, design and theory.