First Years, Tenth Project - Type Play and Poster

Our first year students have just spent a challenging and fruitful two weeks working alongside our 'national treasure', H.R.H The Typographer Royal, Dame Rhiannon Robinson OBT*.

As you probably know, Dame Rhiannon is a demanding taskmistress with a ruthless, critical eye that can spot the slightest typographic imperfection at more than twenty paces. 

Luckily for our novice students she took them through the fundamentals of good typography through a series of lectures, on-screen tutorial sessions and lots of experimental play (see previous post).

This is but the start of a very long journey, but even after such a short time the students can all spot loose tracking, unfortunate apostrophes, orphans, widows and line lengths that are too long or too short.

The project was deceptively simple. Take some information about a typography event that looks like this:

- and turn it into something beautiful like this:


Tim (21), Year 1 Graphic Design 
Like all our two week projects, we put great emphasis on the journey (the ideas development work) not just the destination (the final poster), so here are lots of examples of what can be achieved during two weeks...

First, let's have a look at some of the results of the type-play workshops:

Max (21), Year 1 Graphic Design 

Beth (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Beth (21), Year 1 Graphic Design


Shawna (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Connor (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Connor (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Connor (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Marc (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

As ever, we design on paper before we go digital...

Hannah (21), Year 1 Illustration

Now let's have a look at some of the final posters...

H.R.H checks everything looks 'ship-shape'.

To induce a bit of friendly rivalry we decided to introduce a leader's 'hot seat' (like they have in the Winter Olympics snowboarding).

Dan (below) was an early leader - just look how happy it's made him!

Here's his poster:

We should point out that the students produced some fantastic typographic posters of a quality and attention to detail that would shame the work of most third year students (nationally).

Marc (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Ellie (21), Year 1 Illustration

Max (21), Year 1 Graphic Design 

Connor (21), Year 1 Graphic Design

Dan was joined by two-others on the 'hot-seat' (yes, it got a little cramped) and it looked like the honours would be shared. However, late in the day Beth (21) produced an outstanding piece of work that took the top award and left one bottom only on the by now, very hot, 'hot seat'. Here's the victorious work...

...and here's an ecstatic Beth -  Queen of all she surveys.