Congratulations to all the MATD students of 2010! Good stuff!

Some excellent work here,

I especially like Katari.

All very cute.

Lots of asymmetrical serifs this year.

Woo, thanks for posting, the Reading flavour looks as prominent as last year. I'll enjoy browsing in more depth...

Some of them seem quite impressed by Calluna (the asymmetrical serifs)... I guess you could read that as a compliment for Jos Buivenga's great work.

Alisal, 2001.

Menhart Roman, 1933/1934.

Nicolas Jenson's Roman, 1475.

A serif, be it symmetrical, asymmetrical, or totally gone, is not what makes a typeface. The designer/chef has to do battle with all of the ingredients before they make a soup worth eating.

And lay off the MSG.

:-)

Very good indeed. And, when compared to The Royal Academy of Art of the Hague -school, with disturbing similarity in their forms; these are a fresh addition.

Nice work. Great to know that they give equal importance to non-Latin scripts.
Reading students seem to have gotten over Unger's style at last.

I studied on the undergraduate degree course in Typography and came across these at work yesterday. Having known the students personally I'm glad to see some impressive results; slightly biased toward Yukatek as I know the work that went into it.

I think Formal (Latin) by Marc Weymann is the best amongst all.

Congratulations to this year's graduates!

Promising, but there is definitely a « Reading » touch...

I think people would be able to appreciate these more if there were before and after comparisons.

YES! More RoP's to read into the wee hours of the morning! Congrats to all the graduates!

Quote: Promising, but there is definitely a « Reading » touch... (unquote)

That’s the thing with good and great teachers — they impress themselves upon their students. And that impression almost always subsides and the personalities of the students show themselves.

Reading must be a great place to study type design!

Bert, thank you for putting that out there. I had something I wanted to say but — and perhaps it is because I went to Reading and feel so protective — was struggling to find a way to say it that didn't make me sound like a jerk.

I think it's objective enough to say there is a Reading touch, and that is not pejorative by any means. Plenty of schools have their styles, especially when their are only a handful of students.

This work is clearly very good, regardless of discussion about styles/teaching and whatever. I'd be lucky to ever be this accomplished within my lifetime.

Good stuff, well done.

I like Formal as well-- it definitely has some Dwiggins (electra) / Highsmith (quiosco) undertones, but it has a really nice humanist touches to it.

Andrew (1985) makes an important point. Describing stylistic similarities/influences and judging design are separate issues.

Too glad now that I resisted adding Trinité, 1978-81. to the list!  :)

...that is not pejorative by any means.

By some means...

On the one hand I'm critical of the free-for-all approach where students are given creative license, but on the other, eager-to-please uniformity doesn't seem quite right either.

Perhaps there is too much to put into a one-year course: both technics and style -- a technical training in font production encompassing multiple scripts, and an education in type design encompassing diversity of style.

When Fred Goudy taught lettering at the Holme School in Chicago (to Oz Cooper, among others), did he confine students to a single style, because they could pick up the rest later?

Nick: When Fred Goudy taught lettering at the Holme School in Chicago (to Oz Cooper, among others), did he confine students to a single style, because they could pick up the rest later?

There's a big difference between teaching lettering and teaching typeface design. If I wanted to study lettering, I wouldn't sign up for a masters in type design. Lettering is about styles and techniques for achieving them. Type design is about mastering a set of skills that can be applied to the production of fonts, largely independent of the style of lettering embodied in those fonts.

I don't think there is a Reading style in the sense that there is a kind of letter that the teachers encourage students to produce. This is demonstrated by the fact that over the years numerous students have produced designs that clearly do not reflect such a style, and often it is these students who have received distinctions for their work. Rather, I think there are students who have more and less original ideas about letters, and the latter seem to gravitate to some common tropes.

Type design is about mastering a set of skills that can be applied to the production of fonts, largely independent of the style of lettering embodied in those fonts.

I disagree. Font production is not type design.
Teaching font production is not teaching type design.

Do students @ Reading get jellybeans thrown at them fingers pointed at them and laughed at if they don't include non-Latin alphabets in their typefaces?

@angusrshamal one of my classmates was stoned for not including italic. He, obviously, did not finish the course.

Nick, I didn't say 'teaching font production', I said 'mastering a set of skills that can be applied to the production of fonts'. The skills are what is taught and the production of fonts — which I take to include both design and manufacture -- is the matter to which the skills apply. Anyone who tries to teach type design independent of the production of fonts isn't teaching type design. He may in fact be teaching lettering, or he might just be failing to teach type design.

@John: ... the production of fonts — which I take to include both design and manufacture ...

In a literal sense, yes, but in most industries (including graphics), production and design are separate jobs.
However, in small businesses, such as many type foundries, one is required to do both.
That's why I find an emphasis on production, and the idea that design can be picked up later, lacking.
Surely both are important.

Don't you think that a skill set which is taught with regard to one genre of type is lop sided?
Like only studying how to play Beethoven.

Nick are you still discussing Reading or just ranting off the cuff?

Claus, when an institution (be it business or educational) is critiqued, those associated with it can take the criticism personally.
But please try to deal with the argument and not insult the person making it.

Hmm… I have the impression it doesn't make sense to evaluate these typefaces side-by-side. It seems to me people go to study to Reading or similar school to learn important things about letters, their forms, history and use, and the people which attend are as much diverse as you can get.
In general, it seems to me there are people like graphic designers whose desire is to learn more about the alphabet which aren’t interested in the beginning to strive for originality as a priority for their type design (maybe they will not even design other typefaces).
Inversely there are people which are extremely interested in learning about letters, which may go on to design typefaces and keep on studying the history of the written word, but whose typeface may be simply the means to learn better. I envy them, since I never had the patience to learn by trial and error, and my personal works have been more experiments than other… :-)

It seems to me you can have a certain feeling about this "homogeneity" so much discussed, but nonetheless there are typefaces which are outstanding, while sharing these characteristics. One of them, to me, is Cassius by Mathieu Réguer. I would really buy a license, whenever he’ll decide to complete it… :)

I think it should be valued both the pyrotecnic madness of the 1990s (where graphic designers, or complete amateurs like me went on designing letters — and Matthew Carter DO appreciated it) and the systematic approach of a design school like Reading or the course of the Aia. You can’t suppress one aspect in favor of the other. While I deeply value landmark experiments of the 1990s (i.e. Barry Deck’s, to have just a name), you realize afterwards that you can really evaluate with an understanding, or – better said – a personal knowledge of what you handle. This may happen to you as an autodidact, but nonetheless you have to learn… :)

>>since I never had the patience to learn by trial and error, and my personal works have been more experiments than other… <<

Claudio,
You are too modest! We should all thank you for taking your own course and making discoveries from the experience. I wish we could see more of your work released.

Fondest Regards,

Chris

Nick, you seem to acknowledge how I explained my use of the term ‘production’, i.e. making fonts, including design and manufacture, and then go on to ignore that use.

I don't think design is somehow left ‘to be picked up later’ at Reading, but the focus seems to be on skill development and design is studied and practised in the context of making fonts, i.e. of designing typefaces as working products not on drawing lovely letters. Insofar as the graduates hope to have jobs in the type business, I think this is a sensible approach, because the skills they are learning are the skills they will need.

Does the Reading programme provide in itself all the letter design training that a type designer will need to produce not only workable fonts but original, well crafted typefaces? No, I don't think it does, and the student work seems to me to reflect pretty clearly the prior experience and skills of the individual students. What it does do is to teach design skills in the context of making typefaces, which is something different than teaching lettering which, if you remember, is the original point I made in response to your comment about Goudy and Cooper.

Only in today's World do we ever even see school projects available for international public scrutiny. I can't bear the thought of my student work from 45 years ago being available for international criticism. I admire not only the work of today's young people, but their chutzpah to post it to the World. Pretty damn good "student" work!

Madness. Can't we just enjoy the moment?

Well done again to the students, I really admire your hard work.

Sorry Andrew, I'll pick a better time and place.

I generally think the "constraints" named by Nick are part of the premises.
More radical experiments would be harder to judge, and they could be misinterpreted, so all the room for the experimentation is "tamed" in order to produce typefaces which are, say – "functional".

Anyway, some of them aren't constraints at all. The proportions of many typefaces produced at Reading are just within the range of correct proportions for a text-aimed family. Outside of them, they would be unusable.
My only critique would be that many of them, and of the KABK, are too "polished", and that‘s precisely a reaction to that which motivated me to attempt type design in the first place. I disliked what ITC produced in the 1970s and 1980s, for example. To me, Barry Deck‘s Arbitrary was a "return to lead" of sorts… :-)

@Nick: Thanks, but they need to find their time to develop. I need to design something I would use, and I would not use most of the things I have done, simply because the cultural climate is different. Now the tension is at another level. But I will wait for your "Radio Shack inspired" family.

Edit: Oh, gosh, you have released it!
I think I will have to seriously evaluate a purchase.