Q&A: Typography, signs and design

What does typography have to do with signage?

To answer that question, along with many others, we're assembling a panel of local design heavyweights for a live Q&A this Wednesday at 11:30 a.m. PST. It will feature a range of Vancouver's top designers and experts who will take your questions on signage, typography, local design history and today's everything-old-is-new-again aesthetic resurgence. They'll share their favourite signs and tackle this fascinating interdisciplinay subject. After all, as one of our expert says, "fonts are the clothes that words wear" and it turns out that many of our city's historic signs are dressed to impress.

Our experts will include:

Dr Shelley Gruendler is a typographer, designer, and educator who teaches, lectures, and publishes internationally on typography and design. She holds a PhD and an MA in The History and Theory of Typography and Graphic Communication from the University of Reading, England and a Bachelor of Environmental Design in Graphic Design from North Carolina State University, United States. Shelley has spoken at TypoBerlin, ATypI, TypeCon, and How; has published articles in Communication Arts, Codex, How, and Step; and has judged international typography for Communication Arts and Canadian book design for the Alcuin Society. She is proud to live in the Canadian Typographic Archipelago and she plans to publish her biography of Beatrice Warde, the champion of accessible typographic theory, within the next few years. Shelley travels the world as the founding director of Type Camp International™.

Joan Siedl has been working on the Museum of Vancouver’s neon collection since the early 1990s when she found the signs uncatalogued and uninterpreted in an off-site storage area. She project managed MOV’s 1999 exhibition City Lights: Neon in Vancouver, bringing in John Atkin as guest curator and continues to collect neon for the MOV, even admitting to ambulance-chasing the Smilin’ Buddha sign and the Blue Eagle Café sign for its collection. She is currently deep into curating Neon Vancouver/Ugly Vancouver, an exhibition that opens at the museum October 13.

Ross Milne holds a Masters in type design from the Type and Media course at Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, Netherlands and an undergraduate degree from Emily Carr University. Ross is currently a partner at Working Format, a Vancouver-based design studio specializing in graphic design, art direction and type design for print and screen. Alongside his practice, Ross teaches typography and type design at the Emily Carr University and collaborates with Typotheque, a Dutch type-design studio on the publication of his own typefaces. His work has received a number of honours from regional and international publications and awards.