Workshops
June 1st & 2nd, 2016
Sumner Stone is the principal and founder of Stone Type Foundry Inc. in Rumsey, California. He has designed numerous typeface families and superfamilies. Mr. Stone was the art director and one of the designers of the prize winning ITC Bodoni. Other projects have included the design of initials for the Arion Press Bible and the revival of Frederic Goudy’s Scripps College Old Style type. He is the author of books and articles about type design and typography, and has given many lectures and workshops on these subjects.
From 1984 to 1989 Mr. Stone was Director of Typography for Adobe Systems, Inc., Mountain View, California where he conceived and implemented Adobe’s typographic program including the Adobe Originals. He has served on the boards The Edward Johnston Foundation, Letterform Archive, and the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). He was the editor of Type: A Journal of the ATypI. Recently he has taught typeface design through Type@Cooper and will be teaching the Extended Program for Type@Cooper West through Letterform Archive in San Francisco in 2016.
You will write, draw and digitize letterforms using various approaches.
Then you will produce variations, refinements and trial settings.
On a conceptual and practical level, you will explore how the qualities of hand made letters – gesture, balance, vitality, personality – may be preserved in making letters which are ultimately produced by a machine.
What is lost/gained in the process of making type.
You will also look at alphabets as systems and the strategies that may be employed in translating the scribal tradition in which letters are seen as patterns of strokes into the typographic tradition where letters are seen as conceptual configurations.
The aim is to give attendees a basis on which to begin or expand their own personal tradition of letter making.
