The header of the website, featuring Gig prominently.

Women in Type is a three-year research project undertaken at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication of the University of Reading between March 2018 and November 2021.

It highlights the work of women as key contributors to the design process of many renowned typefaces of the 20th century. The project is led by Prof. Fiona Ross with principal researcher Dr. Alice Savoie and post-doctoral assistant Dr. Helena Lekka.

The website was conceived by Alice Savoie (content and project management) and Mathieu Triay (design and code) as an accessible and interactive tool to share the project’s findings with the wider public.

In terms of design, the website makes heavy use of Gig designed by Franziska Weitgruber for any display use, including the titles of the articles. It was chosen because it gave an energetic hand-drawn feeling which was reminiscent of the work accomplished by the women of the type drawing offices while remaining fresh and contemporary.

To contrast, and for extended text use, the site uses Grotesque 6 by Émilie Rigaud. It follows the classical Stephenson Blake Grotesque model while bringing just enough modernity to turn the wonky shapes into an even and attractive texture, easily referencing the metal type era the research talks about. However, it doesn't come with its own italics. Émilie highlights (while wondering if what was initially a purposeful decision is now a small oversight):

Designers who used it since then have found alternatives, like underlining it or switching to a different typeface to create a nice contrast.

So to answer the brief, the website uses the variable font of Gig to achieve a matching stroke weight and x-height which allows it be used as italics elegantly inside text set in Grotesque 6.

Gig is used for article titles and headers while Grotesque 6 allows for more functional use in buttons.

An article page featuring Gig for the title and Grotesque 6 for the main text and captions.

Gig is also used for some pull quotes but also for the italics inside the text and captions

Cassette inlay for the 1985 text adventure game The Secret of St. Brides.

The Games Mistresses were a somewhat secretive games studio operating out of St. Bride’s, a boutique holiday destination that allowed adults to experience life as a 1920s boarding-school pupil. Their games were published in the 1980s and they specialised in text adventures. Aaron A. Reed has an intriguing write-up in a blog post published in June 2021.

The first title is The Secret of St. Brides, produced for the ZX Spectrum. It uses Binner for the title on the cassette inlay and the cassette itself. Other typefaces used for the inlay are Broadway Engraved (“The St. Bride’s”), Gallia (“Adventure Guide”), Volta (“Watch out for …”), Grotesque No. 9 (“Raffles” etc.), and ITC Zapf Chancery (“Setting Out …”). All of these faces were available from Letraset for dry transfer lettering at the time. The body copy is set in Times, and “Distributed by Audiogenic Software Ltd.” in Helvetica Bold. The ISBN and barcode numbers are from OCR-A and OCR-B, respectively. “48K Spectrum” appears to be hand-written lettering.

The racy advert shown at the end of this post uses a quote, St. O’Trinians, set in Broadway Engraved for the title. The quote itself is a sort of pun playing on St. Trinians and the Mistresses’ home country of Ireland. The body text of the advert is one of the commercially popular sans-serif typefaces, probably Helvetica.

Cassette label for The Secret of St. Brides.

Magazine advert for The Secret of St. Bride’s [sic].

Laser-cut poster at Reading Hackspace. The font that Tony Short used is Cruz Stencil, a lesser-known design by the great Ray Cruz.

The website of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading uses two typefaces by graduates of its renowned MA Typeface Design programme: Iskra by Thomas Grace, and Abril Text by Veronika Burian & José Scaglione.

Have a look at the work from the 2014 MATD class, which has just been published.

This book arose from the invitation to mount a substantial exhibition at the ATypl conference in Hong Kong in 2012. It was published by the St Bride Foundation and contains essays by renowned specialists in the field of non-Latin type design and lots of unique material from the Non-Latin Type Collection at the University of Reading. The exhibition and the book were edited by Fiona Ross and Vaibhav Singh. It was designed by Vaibhav Singh and Paul Luna and the text is set in Skolar, designed by David Březina.

You can order this book from St Bride Library shop.

Contents:

• The Non-Latin Type Collection – introduction by Paul Luna
• Non-Latin scripts and printing technologies: triumphs and tribulations – essay by Graham Shaw
• Selected exhibits from the Non-Latin Type Collection, University of Reading
• Non-Latin scripts: key issues in type design – essay by Fiona Ross
• The shapes of language – afterword by John D. Berry