Paul Shaw Letter Design » Tours & Events

28 March 2012

Type Americana 2

Type Americana 2, a conference devoted to the history of American type design, will take place May 4–6 at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington. It will include talks by Paul F. Gehl, Custodian of the John M. Wing Foundation at the Newberry Library, on Robert Hunter Middleton and Douglas McMurtrie, two of the key figures behind the type design program at Ludlow Typograph; Cathleen A. Baker on the Roycroft career of papermaker and paper historian …
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28 March 2012

TDC Queens Walking Tour

TDC Type Walk with Paul Shaw
Woodside and Jackson Heights
Sunday, April 29
11 am to 2 pm
TDC members $35
Non members $45
El Indio Amazonico (Jackson Heights, Queens)
The Spring 2012 TDC Type Walk will return to Queens, specifically to the neighboring neighborhoods of Woodside and Jackson Heights. These are two ethnically strong neighborhoods—Irish, Filipino, Korean, Ecuadorean, Colombian, Chinese and more—which means that we will see a wide variety of commercial lettering as well as the usual institutional examples. Thus, there will be Irish …
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8 March 2012

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System in New Paltz

At the invitation of Aleanna Lüthi-Garrecht, Arthur Hoener and Amy Papaelias, professors in the Art Department at SUNY New Paltz, I was invited to speak to their design students on Helvetica and the New York City Subway System on March 7.
Poster design by Aleanna Lüthi-Garrecht
The invitation gave me a great excuse not only to see an old friend (Aleanna and I met on one of the Legacy of Letters tours of Rome in the late 1990s), but …
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7 March 2012

Bushwick / East Williamsburg and Tribeca Lettering Walks

This spring I organized two custom urban lettering tours in New York City. On March 4, at the behest of Troy Leinster, I led alumni of the summer (short-term) CooperType program on walk through Bushwick and East Williamsburg. Two days later I was supposed to lead a group of students from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota on a walk in Tribeca. Due to some confusion they were unable to make it, but several of the CooperType …
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9 February 2012

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System passes a milestone

When The MIT Press offered to republish Helvetica and the New York City Subway System they initially planned a print run of 3000 copies. While it was far more than the modest 500 copies that Blue Pencil Editions did originally, it was a standard quantity for design titles. But The MIT Press quickly changed their minds and, to my astonishment, upped the figure to 5000 copies. Their faith in the book, especially that of their executive editor Roger Conover, has …
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4 February 2012

New praise for Helvetica and the New York City Subway

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System has been awarded an Honorable Mention at the 2011 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Award) in the Architecture & Urban Planning category by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over forty categories. Judged by peer publishers, …
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16 January 2012

Codex

I am excited to announce that John Boardley, publisher of the popular website ilovetypography, has asked me to serve as editor of the second issue of his print publication Codex.
Codex: The Journal of Typography (Issue 1, Spring 2011). Front cover.
For those unaware of Codex, its debut issue, published in spring 2011, contains a wonderful mix of material, both high and low, scholarly and popular: a review of the typeface Huronia, a paean to Ottmar …
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14 December 2011

Vacation for lettermaniacs

Wood type at the Tipoteca. Photograph by Carlo Scherer (2010). The 2012 Legacy of Letters Tour and Workshop is shaping up quickly. Five people—a healthy mix of calligraphers, graphic designers and letterpress printers—are signed up and with one more participant the tour will become a reality. The tour is deliberately kept small—twelve people maximum, six minimum—in order to enhance the experience for everyone involved. This edition of Legacy of Letters broadens the workshop experience to encompass half …
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27 October 2011

AIGA Chicago: Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

AIGA Chicago presents Designer as Author
Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: a talk and book signing
Paul Shaw
Getty Images
122 South Michigan Avenue, Suite 900
Wednesday, November 16
Registration 6–6:30 pm; Presentation and book signing 6:30–8:30 pm
AIGA Chicago is pleased to present Paul Shaw in our next installment of Designer as Author, an ongoing series devoted to discussing written works with the designer-authors who create them.
The story of signage on the New York City Subway System is both a long and …
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17 October 2011

Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum Wayzgoose 2011

Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum
Wayzgoose 2011
November 4–6Wayzgoose 2011 is coming, and we’re full up! If you’d like to be on a waiting list in the event of a cancellation you can email Jim Moran at jim.moran@woodtype.org Throughout the day Friday, November 4th we’ll be hosting casual demonstrations as part of our open house. Paul Shaw, Stan Nelson, and our very own Mardell Doubek and Norb Brylski will be scribing, cutting and punching type while you tour the museum. …
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12 October 2011

Legacy of Letters Workshop & Tour 2012

Legacy of Letters Workshop & Tour
Milan · Parma · Cornuda· Aquileia · Venice · Rovereto · Verona
Paul Shaw · Alta Price · Luca Barcellona · Lucio Passerini · James Clough · Sandro Berra
Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione
18–28 July 2012
Legacy of Letters 2012
In 2012 Legacy of Letters will again be a combination workshop and tour, but this time the emphasis will be on the former. The workshop, focusing on calligraphy, typography and letterpress printing, will take place over the course of a …
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11 October 2011

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

The Art Directors Club of Tulsa and the Philbrook Museum of Art present
Helvetica and the New York City Subway System
An illustrated talk by Paul Shaw Thursday, October 20, 2011 There are many strange sights on the New York City subway… but one that has nagged type nerds for decades is the hodgepodge of lettering styles on the signage! Delve into the rich history of the sign system with Paul Shaw—award-winning designer, historian and author of Helvetica and …
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24 September 2011

Type Walk Berlin

One of the highlights of my brief visit to Berlin in July was a short type walk led by Florian Hardwig. The highlight of the highlight was a visit to the Jerusalem und Neues Kirchen cemetery (part of a complex of six cemeteries called Friedhöfe vor dem Halleschen Tor). Here are a few of the most interesting items that Indra Kupferschmid and I came across after we broke away from the rest of the group.
Theﬁrst is a gravestone for …
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18 September 2011

TDC Type Walk: Fort Greene & Clinton Hill, Brooklyn

The fall 2011 TDC type tour will return to the borough of Brooklyn. This time we will explore the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill. These are brownstone neighborhoods where the lettering excitement is going to come primarily from small businesses along with churches and a few institutions such as Pratt Institute. They have been revived but not completely gentrified so there are still older signs to see.

7 September 2011

Paul Shaw Book Talk

South Ferry station (2009)The Skyscraper Museum
39 Battery Place, New York City
6:30 pm, Wednesday, 5 October 2011 Paul Shaw looks at how the subway’s signage system has evolved over the past forty years in his book, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System. The resulting story is more than a tale of a typeface. It is a look at the forces that have molded a signage system.

1 September 2011

Tale of a Typeface: Paul Shaw’s “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System”

Porcelain enamel 8th Avenue IND sign (1930s)Transit Museum
Corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn Heights
6 pm, Thursday, 22 September 2011 Graphic designer, typographer, calligrapher, and author Paul Shaw—for whom letters and words are everything—will present a new edition of his acclaimed book, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System (The MIT Press). It features additional photos and annotations. The resulting story is more than a tale of a typeface; it’s a look at the …
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