Extol: Phil Baines celebrating letters

This exhibition highlighted the value of material culture within graphic design through an exploration of the lettering and design practice of Central Saint Martins Professor Emeritus Phil Baines (1958–2024). The title reflects the celebratory nature of Baines’s relationship with the material cultures of lettering and typography and the way they inspired his idiosyncratic and instructive approach to the handling of language within design.

The exhibition was held in the Lethaby Gallery (Central Saint Martins) from 07 November to 3 December 2023 and was co-curated by Catherine Dixon and Judy Willcocks, Head of Museum & Study Collection at CSM. The exhibition gathered research, notes, ephemera and published work amounting to over 350 objects with additional monitors screening digital images of sketch books and design drawings. Audio-clips from Baines and studio credits offered further context for the wider environment in which he was operating. Baines collaborated with the curators on the selection of the work and designed the exhibition’s visual identity.

Material was divided across 8 different areas: Collecting; Experimenting with language; Building a collaborative practice; Extolling; Book design; Drawing letters; Public lettering: architectural collaboration; Public lettering: narrative and identity. Each represented a key aspect of Baines’s practice and suggested a trajectory from finding a voice through early personal experimentation in sketchbooks and the letterpress composing room to client-based work and collaboration with key commercial and cultural institutions, publishers and more latterly architects.

Baines’s design process was evidenced alongside design outcomes to highlight the scope of references he worked with and the complexity of thinking that underpins how language is rendered. Technology panels contextualised different material processes (particularly those which are now commercially obsolete) and their impact on the Baines’s output. The exhibition also featured objects from the collections that Baines studied and surrounded himself with as a form of knowledge-building. These included rubbings made from gravestones, road and railway signage, shop fascia letterforms and some of the thousands of images of public lettering Baines collected with Catherine Dixon and which underpinned their book Signs, Lettering in the environment (2003).

Baines’s object-based approach to teaching and learning was represented through items from the Central Lettering Record and the CSM Museum & Study Collection which were regularly used in his teaching such as a Monotype matrix case and printed books. These included a 1904 facsimile edition of the 1499 Aldine Press Hypnerotomachia Poliphili showing examples of escalated indents which Baines used in his degree show work alongside an anthology of poetry by Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius, printed in Birmingham by John Baskerville which inspired one of his cover designs for the Penguin Great Ideas series. A more idiosyncratic teaching exemplar of Baines we featured was a treatise on horse breeding published in 1672 by George Simon Winters in Latin, German, Italian and French and which uses four different type faces set in parallel columns. It highlighted the creative complexity of functional textual arrangement that Baines enjoyed so much and encouraged others to explore.

While this exhibition featured the practice of an individual, it also surfaced the collaborative nature of Baines’s practice, whether explicit or implicit. Captions sought to articulate the importance of the networks of support Baines established with his student peers, through early commissions and with clients that allowed Baines to continue to follow an experimental path throughout his career.

Contribution to knowledge
• To articulate the myriad ways material culture research informs contemporary design practice via a deep dive case study of one designer’s practice.
• To illustrate that impact by placing the material culture that inspired Baines’s practice alongside his work in a physical space for the first time.
• To surface the implicitly and explicitly collaborative nature of design practice.
• To stage a rare major public exhibition celebrating the work of a typographer.
Impact
• This free exhibition in a central London location introduced non-specialist audiences to a creative discipline which rarely gets a platform in public spaces.
• The exhibition had 2,800 visitors including students, families, tourists and subject specialists.
• The exhibition attracted a significant amount of press coverage including a feature in international graphic design magazine Eye and was referenced in subsequent obituaries for Baines in Wallpaper magazine and The Guardian.

• Organisation
• https://eyemagazine.com/blog/post/dottin...
• https://letterexchange.org/shop/forum-jo...
• https://wemadethis.co.uk/blog/2023/11/ex...