2017 Updike Prize Award Ceremony and Lecture
The Providence Public Library, located in Providence, Rhode Island, houses amazing collections, among them the Daniel Berkeley Updike Collection. The Updike Collection includes original type specimens of the bygone eras and other historical materials relating to the history of printing.
Every year, the library holds a type design competition, and June Shin—the 2016 winner and frequent user of the collection—created the event poster for the 2017 Updike Prize Award Ceremony and Lecture, which took place in October. She took a purely typographic approach that foregrounded two typefaces designed by the speaker Nina Stössinger herself. This approach feels appropriate for a lecture about designing typefaces, given by a typeface designer.
Taken from the title of the lecture, “Looking, Making, Questioning: Approaches to Type Design,” the phrase “Looking, Making, Questioning,” along with the speaker’s name, is set in Sélavy. Other event details use Nordvest, an innovative and versatile reverse-contrast typeface.
Sélavy is a dotted typeface loosely based on the 13 punched-out caps on Marcel Duchamp’s 1934 Green Box (LA MARIEE MISE A NU PAR SES CELIBATAIRES MEME). It was designed by Nina Stössinger for Paul Soulellis and his project Library of the Printed Web.
(Source: ninastoessinger.com)
Designer June Shin manually hole-punched each and every dot for five limited-edition copies. The poster was awarded the 2017 American Graphic Design Award by Graphic Design USA (GDUSA).
