Type/Lab 2021—22

The GMD Type/Lab was initiated by tutors Alex Cooper and Tim Hutchinson during the 2021—22 academic year. It took the form of a series of workshops and activities where students across all years of the course could explore and experiment with type and language in response to given themes and parameters.

The first workshop projected students into a bleak and desolate world 200 years into the future, where everything had been destroyed. The mission was to create a series of typographic messages to send back in time, depicting the loss and decay, thus (hopefully) provoking the audience into action. These messages had to be analogue and were physically made so as to avoid any potential data corruption or other means of interference in the journey back to today. The results were powerful, arresting and intentionally disturbing.

The next workshops dealt with close observation and analysis of type and typefaces. The students were given a set of individual letters and through an analytical process asked to draft and hand-build other letters from the same typeface that they couldn’t see. The activity was likened to forms of archeology where small amounts from objects can be used to re-generate the bigger picture—in this scenario, the results were often very accurate when placed next to the true typefaces.

The final workshop was connected to an ongoing research project by Alex Cooper & Tim Hutchinson (C+H Research) called OPUS. The students collaborated in small teams and were supplied with a set of pre-printed/generated graphic components plus a range of materials with which to work. Each team then worked to combine the materials with the pre-printed elements to form hybrid letters and glyphs. Each team were tasked to create a complete alphabet with most teams then moving on to develop numerals and special characters. This session was vibrant through the work produced plus the dynamic and energy in the studio. It was inspiring to see year one, two and final years working together on the same challenge, in the same space.