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University of Reading, Department of Typography and Graphic Design

My name is James Lloyd. I work in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication here at Reading. We have quite a simple setup in many ways, we offer one undergraduate course only. We've had great success with ONCAMPUS, we enjoy working with students who come in through this route and we hope that continues. In Graphic Design, we try and bring in people with different design backgrounds, who can bring different experiences to students. That includes Toshi Omagari, who is a Japanese typeface designer. He came in earlier this year, in January I think, to give a talk about his research into video game fonts, video typefaces, and gave an amazing talk and ultimately a big party as well, Where we all played video games together, did lots of experimental work, creating these kinds of pixel fonts using LEGO and letter press and Post it notes and all kinds of things. So that series of talks is actually led by our own students. We trust our students to do all kinds of things. They run this series of guest lecture talks, they run our Instagram feed. So all of that is student managed. They're our absolute pleasure and they're our best advert for what we do.

In terms of other things that you'll need to know about, of course, we've got The Times ranking. Why did we do well on that? It's mainly for these reasons: Excellent research. We're always ranked really highly for the quality of our staff research. Our graduate prospects. That is to say our students get good jobs and the standards of entry. So we attract students with a very high grade profile. We have ranked third in the UK for the mean income of our graduates. That is to say when they get their first job, it's quite a high salary level and it's really common for us to have graduates who get jobs for say, £30,000 with big companies. So we always do well on that kind of thing.

About 45 students in a year group, that makes us small. We're like a little kind of boutique course. A lot of design courses in the UK will have a cohort of 200, 250 people, sit in a big barn and you don't get a lot of attention necessarily, computers. We're the opposite. Very small, very high staff to student ratio and in terms of what our course is really about. I mentioned that I am based in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication. So I wanted to just outline for a moment what we mean by typography. It's kind of a big deal to us. So we use the word typography to mean, the architectural components of letters and these can be Latin script but also international scripts as well that we work with. But we can also mean, the way that those letters are styled up. So not just the technical components, but the visual styling of them. We also use typography to mean, the way that people put words and letters together, lets them work together to form lines of type and paragraphs of type and eventually the way that you put those together to form pages whether those are web pages, or pages of an app, or the pages of a traditional book. All these things together are what we refer to as typography and although our degree course
is called Graphic Communication, we have a very strong focus within that on typography. A good way of something that up is, we're just really into fonts. We know lots of other people are, we know lots of young people have opinions on these things. Fonts and typefaces are at the core of what we do for a range of reasons.

Another plank of what we do is what we refer to as design thinking. That is to say that our course, is a very academic course by graphic design course standards in the UK. There is a 10,000 word dissertation, there are exams, people are critiquing their work constantly, reading a lot of books. It's not a purely practical course, it's not a purely technical course, it's very much an academic design course, that's backed up by some of our staff. For example, we were joined a couple of years ago by Rick Poynor, who is the founding editor of Eye Magazine, probably one of the world's leading journals of graphic design and visual culture. He's revamped our whole history course, since he arrived and brought that up-to-date.

Another strand of what we do is, what some of us call, Design For Good or Design For Change. This is the idea that really every member of staff in our department is interested in design because of its power to actually do something positive in the world. So when we work on projects with students, we'll let them find topics that interest them, whether it's things to do with pollution in the sea, or helping local voluntary organizations, helping young people with their mental health, or indeed looking at things to do with COVID 19, spread of the disease. All these things, all these kind of big world issues, we encourage students to grapple with and use the skills they learn in Graphic Design, to really get under the skin off. What does that mean
in practice in terms of what students design? Well probably what you imagine. Apps and websites, promotional material, newspapers, lots of editorial design magazines and books, those kinds of things but when we do all of that, we're always getting students to think in detail about, well, how they actually made? What's the technical manufacturing that goes on here? How does the printing process affect things? How can you use colour to bring something to life or illustration? How does the material quality, the way that something feels, actually affect the way that people interact with it not just the way they feel about what they do with it? And at the very base level, in amongst it all, we look at typography and how the beauty, the sort of history and the functionality of letter forms are really the building blocks of what Graphic Communication is.

We have amazing links with industry. We always have tutors who come in from larger organisations. These guys on screen are from Oxford University Press, they come and teach a book design project. We have colleagues from IBM, who come in and teach a UX app design project. We have a team working explicitly on diversity, on trying to diversify our curriculum and help students and staff understand that there's more to the history of design and the future of design than just what a bunch of old white guys think about stuff. We have a scheme that we call real jobs. This is our professional practice scheme where all of our students get to take on live briefs from clients throughout the course of their studies. So that when they graduate and they're looking for jobs, you will all know the kind of job that sort of suggests, well you must have two or three years professional experience to apply for this job, all of us students can kind of say, well, yeah, I really do have that experience because I've been working, as I've been studying. We even let our students design our own promotional materials. So this is a big recruitment fair for our whole school, designed by 2 students in our Typography department last year. These guys are working with gloves that simulate arthritis. We are a very user centred design department. The way that we think of design is that you have to produce things that actually help people. So these guys were designing an app and we gave them these gloves that restrict the movements in your fingers, the same way that movement might be restricted for an older person or someone with arthritis. The idea is that if you understand that the not everyone's hands function in the same way, then you can design in a way that is accessible and supports more people. Then what do our students go on and do? Well, they become things like, information designers brand managers, UX designers who design websites, visual designers, maybe just freelancers doing all kinds of independent things.

This is Fraser, he designs like record covers and things for all kinds of bands and movie posters big, big movie poster stuff like that. This is Chomoi, he's just finished a two year stint as creative director of the New York Times. This is Coralie Bickford Smith, she's a book designer. If you go into any bookstore in the UK, there is not just a shelf but like a whole bookcase devoted to her work. She's amazing. She works for Penguin. The kind of drawing most of our students do is actually more like what you see on screen here. We're not an art course and we don't insist that everyone has sort of an artistic level of drawing ability, the sort of thing you might expect from art students, instead just drawing circles and boxes is fine. The ability to draw to explain things is what's important to us because most work is ultimately produced on a computer. Drawing for guidance, for diagrams is more important than sort of wonderful sketching ability. The way that we think about our subjects is academic in focus and we're looking for people who can combine creativity and what you might think is a more traditional form of academic or intellectual ability. Thank you very much.