Crafting letters today

In a world where we spend so much time staring at things on screens, it is all the more important to be reminded of our physical place in the real world. Craft skills and the objects made by craftspeople offer one such reminder. Pip Hall and Erik Spiekermann both work with letters that are physical objects in the real world. Pip works cutting letters in stone, and Erik is currently involved in letterpress printing. Both shared their work in the craftsman’s realm, far broader than skilled manual labour. Pip’s talk explored contrasting approaches in lettercarving for poetry.

About our speakers

Pip Hall studied typography and graphics at Reading University, and developed her love of lettering with the city’s fabled publisher Two Rivers Press. Her desire to make things led to working in stone and for the past 16 years she has lived on the edge of Yorkshire Dales in Cumbria. Pip is one of the country’s leading letter carvers. Her work includes architectural lettering, commemorative and celebratory garden sculpture, and relief carving. Her public art commissions include Stanza Stones in the Southern Pennines with Simon Armitage, as part of Yorkshire’s Cultural Olympiad, and installations with poets Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Bush, Jackie Kay and Jeanette Winterson along the Brontë Stones trail. More recently, Pip has been extending her illustrative skills into the field of lino-cutting for wallpaper and fabric designs.

Erik Spiekermann‘s graphic identity and design work has been a distinctive part of the visual landscape since the 1970s. As founder of MetaDesign and Edenspiekermann, he gave a defining look to Berlin’s public transport system, Deutsche Bahn, The Economist and companies such as Audi, Volkswagen and Bosch, among others. His work has been recognized with Europe’s most prestigious design prizes and honours, including the Royal Designer for Industry title from the Royal Society of Arts. FontShop, the first mail-order distributor for computer fonts, can be traced back to his creative initiative, as can numerous typeface designs, such as ITC Officina and FF Meta – both of which are now classics on many hard drives. He is the founder and lifetime member of the Typographic Circle, past president of the ISTD and has received lifetime awards from various US, British, and German institutions. To this day, he remains a central figure in the German and international design scene. After retiring from active business, he now runs an experimental letterpress workshop in Berlin under the motto »Hacking Gutenberg«.

Recording