Join Fred Smeijers of TypeTailors and Jim Moran of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum for a typographic revival of one of the Plantin Moretus’ oldest posters, promoting – what else? – beer. The print, dating from the 17th century, represents one of the oldest posters in the museum’s collection. Using a series of wooden typographic punches dating from 1580 in the museum’s archive, Smeijers will shed some light on the oldest typographic posters and discuss the process of converting the punches to a working digital font. Moran will share the process of cutting new wood type at Hamilton, based on those vector files. The project culminates in a new printing of the beer poster, which will be given to conference attendees as a commemorative print. Cheers!
Old Beer/New Type
Fred Smeijers
Fred Smeijers is a Dutch type designer, teacher, researcher, and writer. Educated at the school of art in Arnhem, he worked as a typographic advisor to the reprographic company Océ, then became a founding member of the graphic design practice Quadraat, which provided the name for his first published typeface (FontFont, 1992). His distinctive typeface designs include Renard (TEFF), Nobel (DTL), Arnhem, Fresco, Sansa, Custodia, Ludwig, and Puncho (all first published by OurType, the font label that he co-founded and led as creative director until 2017), as well as custom type designs and lettering for Philips Electronics, Canon-Europe, Tom-Tom, Samsung, and Porsche. Smeijers’s first book, Counterpunch, was published by Hyphen Press in 1996, followed by a second edition in 2011 and translations into French, Japanese, and Portuguese. In 2001, Smeijers was awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for outstanding contributions to type design. In 2016, the Society of Typographic Aficionados awarded Smeijers the SOTA Typography Award. Smeijers is a research fellow at the Plantin Museum in Antwerp, professor of type design at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, and visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.
Jim Moran
Jim Moran received his apprenticeship from Moran’s Quality Print Shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, while serving as printer’s devil, pressman, partner, and owner for 29 years. He became the Director of Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in 2009, where he maintains the collection of wood type, runs and repairs the museum’s presses, teaches workshops, archives and restores the museum’s collection of 20th-century decorative and advertising plates, and oversees museum operations. He has presented talks and run workshops at the AIGA national convention, TypeCon, Fossil World Headquarters, IBM in Austin, Texas, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Columbia Center for Book and Paper Art in Chicago, the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles, ATypI Montreal, and the APHA annual conference in Washington, DC.