Welcome to the Sign Design Society

The Sign Design Society (SDS) is for anyone interested in information and graphic communication within buildings and public spaces, including:

As well as raising the profile of our disciplines, we offer members a programme of events, resources and initiatives to help them:

To join choose a membership plan that suits you and sign up!

Our events

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News

Third party events

A composite of black & white yesteryear photos including one showing someone's hand cupping blackberries (still on the stem), with pink writing and doodles superimposed over it.

A panel and performance exploring how community-led spaces sustain and celebrate belonging in London. Supported Cities presents an evening of conversation and celebration as part of LFA. This event brings together community organisers, artists, and leaders of grassroots spaces across London, from sports clubs to creative collective, we will explore how belonging is built and sustained in the city. The panel will reflect on themes of care, inconvenience, and the labour required to hold space for others. What does it take to create and maintain places where people truly feel they belong? The evening continues with a live musical performance response to belonging, offering a shared moment to reflect, connect, and celebrate community-led city-making. Part of the London Festival of Architecture 2026 Programme.

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Black and white head shot of Michael Twyman in middle age, the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading, UK

Michael Twyman’s family and the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication would like you to join us to share and remember the extraordinary breadth and reach of Michael’s research, teaching, leadership and friendship.  

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The words 'Family Planning' in three different typefaces in white on a black background.

A look into non-linear type families and their conception, with Greg Gazdowicz.

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'Method Acting' in yellow coloured typefact with 'In Typeface Design' underneath in white (in different typeface), all on black background.

In 2024, Tal Leming was tasked with designing a new cartographic typeface for the National Geographic Society. This new typeface needed to pair with Society’s long-serving cartographic typefaces. Not much was known about those typefaces, so he started digging into their origins and stumbled onto an amazing story of the Society quietly inventing a form of phototypesetting in the early 1930s. This discovery led to all sorts of concrete and abstract questions that affected the scope of the new typeface. Who designed those typefaces? Why do they look the way that they do? Am I making a new typeface or am I reviving a typeface? Am I even the designer of this new typeface? In this talk, Tal will lead us through the project and share the discoveries he made along the way.

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Examples of typography / letterpress from the Emery Walker Trust representing the work he did for Kelmscott Press and Doves Press

This exhibition will chart Walker’s importance in the world of typography and printing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from his first private press involvement with the founding and operation of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (1891–1898), his partnership with Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson at the Doves Press (1900–1917), through to his final printing collaboration with Wilfred Merton and Bruce Rogers.

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