Greek Week

I left you on the 30th of october while we where having our Arabic workshop with Fiona Ross: a month has gone by and we had two other non-latin workshops, another one by Fiona Ross on Indian scripts and the Greek workshop by Gerry Leonidas, making this last week “the greek week”.

Trying your hand on a new script is definitely confusing at first. As I kept saying these days, it felt like driving a car by night, with my lights turned off: where is it, exactly, I’m trying to go? The approach here in Reading is to give us an overview of the scripts, both from scribal sources and from typographic sources, then trying our hand at actually reproducing the shapes paying attention to the proportions and rhythm of each script, and then seeing the correlation between written samples and type. While we didn’t do it with Arabic and Devanagari due to the complexity of the scripts, we did go digital with Greek. Here are my sketches:

On tuesday we had Richard Kegler from coming in to talk about his experience about founding and running P22, and on thursday we went to London to hear Jost Hochuli speak at the St Bride Library about “Systematic Book Design <QUESTION MARK>”. As you might have guessed, the pace is increasing steadily here in Reading: while all these workshops where going we had another week-long visit by Gerard Unger, and we also have our regular fixtures of the week like the research methods seminars, Michael Twyman’s classes, James Mosley’s classes, etc.

Next saturday most of us will be off home for the holidays, working on our essays and on our typefaces while trying to rest a bit. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll wander off to bed!