Join graphic designer Sarah Hyndman for an interactive talk full of demonstrations about how typefaces influence what we read.
14th September 2014
2-3.30pm
Seminar Room 3, Learning Centre, (Level 3)
V&A
London
Thinking ahead to 2015 this is my proposal below to take Type Tasting to SXSW again next year. This time it’s part of the ‘panel picker’ system which everybody gets to vote for (there’s a link at the bottom).
Sarah Hyndman, Wake Up and Smell the Fonts at TEDxBedford
TEDxBedford 2014 is taking place on the afternoon of the 15th November 2014 at The South Bank Arts Centre, Bedford College. A diverse range of speakers will join us to share their ‘ideas worth spreading’ relating to our theme ‘by Design’.
Designer Sarah Hyndman explores typography as we experience it in our every day lives under the banner of Type Tasting. Since the launch in 2013 she’s curated an exhibition at the V&A for the London Design Festival, been interviewed on Radio 4’s Today, taken Type Tasting to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and has been commissioned to write a book.
Sarah has been a graphic designer for over 15 years, working in agencies before setting up design company With Relish. After studying an MA in Typo/Graphics at the London College of Communication she was invited back as a guest tutor.
Sarah will share with us a story of type and invite us to consider our emotional response to the printed word. Each font/typeface has a personality that influences our interpretation of the words we read by evoking our emotions and setting the scene. We all understand this instinctively but it happens on a subconscious level. Sarah will show us that conscious awareness of the emotional life of fonts can be entertaining and ultimately give us more control over the decisions we make.
The test pilots on the History of type correspondence course are producing some wonderfully creative examples of lettering while they research and learn about the history of typography and type classification.
Workshop: Type styles through history
Learn about typography and the history of type: correspondence course
This course is currently in a tryout phase with our volunteer test pilots…

Sarah Hyndman, MA Typo/graphic Studies Thesis, February 2001 (Distinction). London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Author’s note on the ‘post-culinary society’ of 2000/2001: At the time of writing there were concerns about the rise in popularity of convenience food and a generation who had not been taught how to cook. However, Jamie Oliver had just published The Naked Chef and Britain was soon to fall in love with cooking again.
“The ideal celebratory meal had a structure that started off with an appetising hot and messy dish of gravy over meat and potatoes (without which a meal is not a dinner), and became more of an architectural achievement as it went on through pudding (on a smaller plate), and tea with an optional small coloured biscuit (on a still smaller plate).” Michael Nicod