Pseudonyms by Any Other Name

Issue 7 of Zed was guest edited by Siân Cook and Teal Triggs of the Women's Design Research Unit (WD+RU). Contributors were invited to investigate the theme of 'Public and Private'. Contributions were divided into four themes: navigating/mapping; hiding/revealing; ritual/sexualisation and culture/boundaries.

My visual essay was aligned to the hiding/revealing theme where the private identity of famous names is revealed through a playful typographic list.

The accompanying prose essay explores why and how pseudonyms are employed. I highlighted the reason why the typographer Beatrice Warde – author of The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography – used the pseudonym Paul Beaujon to publish an article about the Garamond types in The Fleuron. As a female author in the 1920s it would have been unlikely her article would have been published under her own name within the male-dominated trades of printing and typography.