Graphic artist Anthony Burrill combines a knack for simplicity that packs a punch with analogue craft skills and powerful, positive messages. Burrill frequently collaborates with other forward-thinking creatives across disciplines spanning music, architecture, curation, education and more; pushing his traditional discipline of choice, letterpress printing, into bold new territories.

Rosalind Wyatt trained initially in Calligraphy and Bookbinding, then completed an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, London. She has worked with stitch and textiles for over twenty years, across the worlds of film, fashion, design, and art. Recent work includes training the leading cast how to write with a quill on the Oscar winning film The Favourite, and couture hand embroidered garments for Burberry UK. Rosalind uses her needle as a writing tool, and much of her work is informed by language, philosophy and textile provenance.

David Pearson is a world-renowned book designer. He graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2002 before working for Penguin Books as a text designer and later, a cover designer. He left to establish his own studio in 2007, which specialises in print design where typography is the principle form of expression. David has been listed as one of Britain’s Top 50 Designers by the Guardian, named by Debrett’s as one of Britain’s 500 most influential people and was appointed Royal Designer for Industry in 2015.

Steven Appleby is an absurdist cartoonist and the creator of comic strips, radio, theatre and the animated television series, Captain Star. He has published over 25 books and his paintings and drawings have appeared in numerous gallery exhibitions and, notably, on the Pixies’ album, Trompe le Monde. His comic strips have appeared in a wide range of publications including The Times, the Sunday Telegraph, and The Guardian. His comic strip, Small Birds Singing, ran for eight years in The Times.

On opening the book of surfaces

Timothy Ingold is one of the foremost anthropologists of his generation. He is the author of over fifteen books covering topics from evolution and social life to creativity and perception. He attended Churchill College, Cambridge, initially studying natural sciences but shifting to anthropology (BA in Social Anthropology 1970, PhD 1976). He is a fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

The pen’s triumph: the tenacity of handwriting in the age of print

Jill Gage is Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation on the History of Printing, and Bibliographer for British Literature and History at the Newberry Library, Chicago. She received her PhD in English Literature from the University of London. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an MS in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has contributed to the Oxford companion to the book and The Newberry 125, and curated a number of exhibitions at the Newberry.

Scratching out the self: autography through the ages

Hunter Dukes is University Lecturer in English Literature at Tampere University, Finland, in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences. He was educated at Pomona College (BA), King’s College (MPhil), and Peterhouse, Cambridge (PhD), where he also held a Research Fellowship. He is a Contributing Editor at The Public Domain Review, and the author of Signature, a narrative history of autography, published by Bloomsbury in the ‘Object Lessons’ series.

Exchanges between modernist typography and Swiss school handwriting

Ueli Kaufmann is a designer and design historian focusing on the history of typography and letterforms, their historiography, and their intertwinement with economy, technology, education, and politics, as well as different professional and cultural practices. He is a doctoral researcher at the University of Bern and a visiting lecturer at the Salzburg University of Applied Sciences.

Finding inspiration in medieval manuscripts

Andrea Wunderlich is a calligrapher, book artist, and designer based in Germany. She has exhibited her artwork internationally, and her work is held in public collections such as the Berlin Calligraphy Collection. She has worked in various fields of lettering-design, on a wide range of commissions, including sign-painting, chalkboard lettering, logo-design, and murals. She is a member of the German calligraphy society Schreibwerkstatt Klingspor Offenbach and was awarded fellowship of the Calligraphy & Lettering Arts Society in 2017.

Draw the line: letters in three dimensions

Julia Vance is an artist based in Norway and Italy (Oslo/Pietrasanta) whose work translates letters into sculpture. Her word-sculptures bend stone into tightly stretched surfaces with precisely defined curves and edges. In expressing a third dimension to the two-dimensional world of lettering and words, she seeks form for the eye and food for thought. She has undertaken several official commissions in Norway (County of Larvik, Munch Museum, Vigeland Museum/Vigeland Sculpture Park in Oslo) and exhibited her work internationally.

The margins of reading and writing: handwriting of the future

Harald Geisler is an artist known for his typographic projects on the role of writing in society. He is a broadly skilled typographer specialising in handwriting fonts. He received his formal education in design from The HfG in Offenbach, during which he republished the book Designing Programs by Karl Gerstner, with Lars Muller Publishers (Switzerland). He currently directs his own studio based in Frankfurt. He has worked for, among others, Linotype (Germany) and the Goethe University (Frankfurt).