summer school: critical approaches to typography
Treat yourself to five days of intensive typography training during the last week of the summer vacation. From Monday 21 to Friday 25 August 2023 we will repeat our international summer school on ‘critical approaches to typography’, organised in cooperation with the University of Antwerp.
This summer school will discuss the value of research for typography. The keywords are ‘Perception’, ‘History’, ‘Convention’, ‘Technology’ and ‘Legibility’. Answers to the research questions will be distilled from the study of artifacts in the collection of the famous Museum Plantin-Moretus. After all, the typographical conventions were set during the Renaissance.
In this programme theory and demonstrations are interspersed with study visits and excursions. No fewer than 6 teachers are involved, all specialists in their field. For this week they are Dr. Frank Blokland, Dr. Wouter Soudan, Joost Depuydt, Dr. Joran Proot, Mirjam Somers and Patrick Goossens.
When
21-25 August 2023
Where
Het Brantijser, University of Antwerp, Sint-Jacobsmarkt 13, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
Who
Bachelor or Master Students and Professionals.
No specific expertise in the field of type design is required, nor any knowledge of the development of historical type and typography.
Credits
3 ECTS credits will be awarded upon writing a paper with answers to the five research questions, an evaluation of the programme and a personal reflection on the five keywords.
Course description
Today everyone who uses a computer is practically a typesetter and typography is no specialism anymore. Conventions are automatically maintained because practitioners of typography – professionals and amateurs – base their typographical decisions on what is common. The legibility aspect seems easy to control by selecting type that is considered common, without knowing what legibility exactly comprises.
Art historian Ernst Gombrich notes that the stimulus patterns on the retina are not alone in determining our picture of the visual world, and that its messages are modified by what we know about the ‘real’ shape of objects. In other words: ‘One cannot see more than one knows’. But what exactly do we know of type and typography?
This summer school will discuss the value of research for typography. The keywords are ‘Perception’, ‘History’, ‘Convention’, ‘Technology’ and ‘Legibility’. Answers to the research questions will be distilled from the study of artifacts in the collection of the famous Museum Plantin-Moretus. After all, the typographical conventions were set during the Renaissance. At the same time we will study how font technology has developed since the 1970s, and look at what became technically possible, in Latin and non-Latin scripts
Registration fee
Students: € 600
Regular: € 800
Fee includes course material (software and printed matter), coffee breaks, farewell dinner, several excursions and social activities.
It does not include lunch or accommodation.
University of Antwerp students are entitled to a refund of €150 after completion of the summer school. Alumni and students of the Plantin Institute of Typography are entitled to a refund of 10% afterwards.
Application details
The detailed program and application form is available at
www.uantwerpen.be/summerschool-typography.
Application deadline
24 July 2023
External partners
University of Antwerp and Museum Plantin-Moretus