House of Lime
I’m kind of obsessed with Dingbats right now. They can be playful and whimsical and they have a rich history too. Here’s a great site to get you going too.
Guest Post
Anna Gerber
Anna Gerber is the founder and director of independent book publisher ‘Visual Editions’.
A graphic designer and design writer based in London, Anna is the author and designer of All Messed Up: Unpredictable Graphics (Laurence King, 2004) and co-editor and co-designer of Influences: A Lexicon of Contemporary Graphic Design (Die Gestalten Verlag, 2006) with Anja Lutz. She writes regularily for the design press, including Creative Review, Print, Eye, Varoom and Idea and her work has also been published in shift!, dot dot dot and +rosebud.
Anna teaches part-time at the London College of Communication on the BA Graphic Design and MA Design Writing Criticism programmes. She has also held workshops and lectures across the UK (including Tate Modern and the V&A), as well as in India, US, Australia and Malaysia. She continues to research areas of graphic design and environmental sustainability. We met Anna quite a long time ago and have been excited about what she’s been producing ever since.
What have you got planned this week?
A sustainability committee meeting at LCC, teaching my MA Design Writing Criticism students, meeting with my business partner, sending out (more) proposals to potential investors, and meeting with one of my future authors.
What do your parents think you do?
They think I make life difficult for myself.
Who do you look like?
Betty Boop.
What’s your favourite sense?
A sense of fear which pretty much always leads to a sense of excitement.
Tell us something people don’t know about you…
I have three tattoos.
Did your education count?
Yes. I wasn’t an easy student, though. Being a pain in the ass and learning to pave my own path definitely taught me more than anything I could have learned in class.
What word can’t you spell?
Don’t know, but you have misspelled “explanation”. ;-)
Tell us a good fact
There were 108 paper mills in the UK ten years ago, today there are 46. Of those 46, only 5 are graphical paper mills.
What’s Next?
visual-editions.com
What’’s your ‘Plan B’?
I never have a Plan B.
Guest Posted Articles
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Zoe Sadokierski
This is one of the most amazing research blogs looking at the way typo/graphic devices are used in literature. Zoe Sadokierski is writing a PhD in this area right now. I’ve been trawling through her research for months and months and don’t think I’ll ever reach the end of it. I hope I never do.
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Shakespeare & Company
I managed to sneak off for a few months from my first degree and go to Paris on a Fellowship to study Sylvia Beach. Beach was an American expat in Paris in the twenties and opened her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Without meaning to, she ended up fostering a whole literary movement there, drawing in writers like James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and was the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses. When I grow up, I want to be Sylvia Beach.
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Calverts
Calverts is a small printing company. They’re a co-operative, they’re local (for me, that is) and they really know what they’re doing. There’s so much talk about the future of print right now and about printing and designing in a sustainable way. And I can’t think about these things without thinking about Calverts. And they’re really nice too.
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Why I Write
This is an event organised by my lovely MA Design Writing Criticism students. It’s happening at the Design Council on 3 June. The event is sold out (which isn’t surprising with people like Peter Hall, Vicky Richardson, Denise Gonzales-Crisp speaking and Jeremy Myerson moderating) but you can follow what’s going on over twitter.