22nd – 27th March 2018
Public Courtyard Gallery, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore The School of Communication is excited to announce an exhibition of typography by current students and staff from the Visual Communication Programme at the Royal College of Art.
Typography has long since ceased to be practiced solely by experts in the craft. It is no longer an arcane subject comprehensible only to initiates. Today, anyone with a drop-down font menu is a ‘typographer’. Civilians have opinions about the suitability of fonts. Type designers make new typefaces on an epidemic scale. The designed word shadows our every waking movement – from books to social media: from lost cat signs stuck on lampposts to dynamic information displays.. Some of us even dream about letterforms.
The blurred borders of the digital/analogue and physical/virtual territories have given typography an identity crisis – an explosion of applications from personalised experiences to complex networked systems demanding sensitive, bespoke solutions, coupled with an exponentially expanding lexicon of visual expression – the traditional rules are increasingly irrelevant. We have reached typographic singularity.
The practice of typography is embedded in the work of students and tutors from the Visual Communication Programme at the RCA. For some, it’s a fundamental building block of communication – just like the spoken word. For others, it’s a way of life, a craft that they will devote their entire lives to perfecting.
Curators:
Jack Lewellyn
Robert Hetherington
Arianna Tilche
Daniel Kozma
Private view: 22 March, 6pm onwards
language
network
show
typography
