Zerofee. Good Thinking:

If you have a real inter­est in typog­ra­phy, you’ll have heard of Alan Kitch­ing, the renowned let­ter­press designer. Alan’s work has been fea­tured in numer­ous design pub­li­ca­tions, com­mis­sioned by top adver­tis­ing agen­cies and has helped to keep inter­est in the craft alive. You may not have heard of Celia Stothart but, along­side Alan, her pas­sion for design, typog­ra­phy and let­ter­press is equally evident.

Alan and Celia gave a talk back in March at the Lon­don Col­lege of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion (LCC), as part of their ‘Chang­ing Face of Let­ter­press’ events and exhi­bi­tion. A while back now but, for those of us that missed it, Alex Cooper and Rose Grid­neff (who run the let­ter­press work­shop and teach at the LCC, as well as oper­at­ing their own practise/studio, The Exper­i­men­tal Let­ter­press Work­shop) have made the talk avail­able as a video pod­cast. The imagery above is screen-grabbed from the pod­cast, just to give you a flavour.

The talk is highly rec­om­mended and deliv­ers insights into Alan’s early career, facil­i­ties, his and Celia’s love of let­ter­press and a year-long effort to recover an enor­mous cache of unloved wood­type from a barn in Som­er­set. For any­one who’s only expe­ri­ence of typog­ra­phy has been dig­i­tal, see­ing how woodtype’s printed appear­ance can be inad­ver­tently ‘fil­tered’ by wood­worm – result­ing in an tac­tile, dis­tressed look usu­ally just sim­u­lated onscreen – should be required viewing.

You can down­load the Alan Kitch­ing and Celia Stothart lec­ture as a video pod­cast from iTunes. Click­ing the link (should) open iTunes and take you to the cor­rect page.

You can fol­low the LCC and Rose Grid­neff on Twit­ter at @lcclon­don and @roseg­rid­neff respectively