Thursday, 4:00pm
26 November 2020
Type Tuesday: Happy Birthday St Bride!
Some of our favourite speakers return to celebrate the 125th anniversary of St Bride Printing Library on 1 December 2020
Eye magazine started organising Type Tuesdays as a regular St Bride Library event back in 2013, and it has been a wonderful partnership: a way to bring designers together for a social occasion that is educative and fun, and an opportunity for the magazine team to keep in touch with readers and contributors, writes Eye editor John L. Walters.
(Left to right, top to bottom) Lucienne Roberts, Morag Myerscough (with Elvis), Hansje van Halem, Dan Rhatigan, Rathna Ramanathan and Erik Spiekermann.
![Type Tuesday_Speakers_Grid [‘litho’] 3x2](https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50648348006_03b970ef2a.jpg)
The pandemic has obliged us to stage the past few Type Tuesdays online via Zoom, but they have been almost equally enjoyable, with the added bonus of being able to involve designers and Eye readers from around the world – rather than only those who can reach St Bride’s Fleet Street hideaway on an early Tuesday evening.
Tickets are available here.
Right and top. Supergraphics by Morag Myerscough.
Poster by Hansje van Halem, 2020.
The next event is the 32nd in our series, and a chance for some of the guest speakers who have appeared at previous Type Tuesdays to bring us up to date with their activities and tell us why they value St Bride.
‘Happy Birthday St Bride’ celebrates 125th anniversary of St Bride Library, and all proceeds will support the current crowdfunder. This campaign aims – among many things – to create an online digitised collection of the printing library’s treasures, so that graphic designers can access them whenever and wherever they live or work.
Stamp designs by Hansje van Halem, 2020.
On Tuesday 1 December we will be joined by six outstanding guest speakers. Hansje van Halem spoke at ‘Type now: Eye 98 live’ in May last year. Read ‘Strategy of excess’, Silvia Sfligiotti’s profile of Hansje in our last type special.
Morag Myerscough spoke at our sold-out ‘Colour!’ event in 2016. You can read my profile of Morag in Eye 79.
Displays for the ‘Medication’ section of ‘Can Graphic Design Save Your Life?’ at the Wellcome Collection, London, 2017-18, curated by Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright, with Shamita Sharmacharja. Photo: Andrew Meredith.
The Other Side, an emotional map of Britain in the wake of Brexit, edited by Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright or by GraphicDesign&, 2020.
Lucienne Roberts, who took part in an earlier Archive night in 2013, has written for Eye several times about ethics and literacy, and spoke eloquently about the urgent subject of healthcare design in ‘A matter of life and death’ in 2017 (alongside Rebecca Wright, her partner in GraphicDesign&).
Rathna Ramanathan, whose work was featured in Eye 64, ‘Roadshows and rickshaws’, was an essential contributor to Archive night in 2016.
Identity design for BBC World Service by Rathna Ramanathan.
Book designs by Rathna Ramanathan.
Erik Spiekermann is an old friend of Eye, part of the original 1990 editorial board, and last year introduced a packed St Bride hall to the concept of ‘Hacking Gutenberg’. You can read about ‘Six degrees of Erik Spiekermann’ in Eye 74, the Berlin special issue.
Erik Spiekermann at Gleisdreieck Underground station in Berlin, after the passenger information for the reunited city had been designed under his direction, 1994.
Spiekermann’s p98a studio in Berlin.
Dan Rhatigan, now Senior Manager at Adobe Type Development, spoke at St Bride about Letraset, zines and other typographic obsessions back in 2013 and was featured in our Monotype special, Eye 84 – see ‘All about workflow’.
Zines by Dan Rhatigan.
The event will be chaired by me, along with Eye art director Simon Esterson.
St Bride librarian Sophie Hawkey-Edwards will also join us to bring Type Tuesday attendees up to date with the success of the crowdfunding campaign and to tell us about her ambitions for the future of this remarkable ‘Temple of type’.
And please mark your diaries for next year: Out next four Type Tuesdays will be on 2 March, 8 June, 7 September and 30 November 2021.
Real or virtual? Nobody knows.
STOP PRESS
To clear some shelving space in our overcrowded warehouse we are making a very special limited offer of Eye bundles. For the next few weeks, while stocks last, you can buy the Eye bundle of numbers 95-98 at an unrepeatable price (UK and Europe only). This is a great present for a work colleague, student designer and anyone who has missed out on these vital, classic issues: the bundle includes the two editorial design specials (76 & 77), the wonderfully eclectic Eye 95 and the most recent type special Eye 98, which includes a profile of Hansje van Halem.
Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.