Events
Online Core: Tools of the Trade: The Evolution of Typographic Technologies
with Briar Levit
Technology and tools are a critical part of the historical development of graphic design and typography. Understanding both the physical processes and the social implications that new innovations brought to the fields of printing, graphic design, and typeface design will deepen your understanding of the form and function of design itself. In addition to changes in design and allied fields, the developments of these technologies throughout history greatly impacted communities as access to tools and the materials they produced disrupted established power structures.
Instructor Briar Levit will explore the ingenuity of these tools that have changed the way we design and communicate and, perhaps most importantly, have repeatedly democratized the spread of information.
Learning Outcomes
- Understanding of the production of metal, photo and digital fonts
- Understanding of the methods of setting metal, photo and digital type
- Understanding of the effects of typographic technologies on graphic design form as they developed
- Understanding of the effects of typographic technologies on societies as they developed
- Ability to connect historical events with current developments in the type and graphic design landscape
- Appreciation of all that came before us
Note: This workshop is only open to students enrolled in the Type West Online Postgraduate Certificate Program in Type Design.
About Briar Levit
Briar Levit is an assistant professor of graphic design at Portland State University, and holds a master’s in communication design from Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in the UK. She came up as a designer in San Francisco in the late 1990s, and missed the cold type era by just a few years.
Briar cut her teeth as a designer working in-house for Discovery Channel Stores, and not long after that became art director at magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture. Her graphic design focus and practice consists primarily of publication design, with a special interest in independent publishing, small presses, and hiking guides (a few of which she has self-published).
Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production was a significant jump out of her comfort zone—but once the idea came to her, it simply wouldn’t go away. The film is currently touring internationally.