Typeface design education from Cooper Union
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Type Lessons From The Nineteenth Century
with Marta Bernstein

For most of the 20th century decorative type was not taken seriously: Modernism with its “less is more” made it superfluous. Ornament was a crime for a long time.

But now those lettershapes are making a comeback: we see more and more display typefaces designed to be used at large sizes, mainly for titles or short sentences, and whose personality has to be apparent in just a few letters. Not created to be timeless, or with readability in mind, they catch better than others the spirit of the time.

How much contemporary type owns to the Victorian era? We will go back to the origin of display typefaces and investigate the wild yet systematic experimentation that generated them. And will see if there is a lesson to be learnt.

Registration is now closed

When:
Mon, June 20, 2022

Where:
The Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square (at East 7th Street)
New York, NY 10003

The Herb Lubalin Lectures are recorded and made available here and on Vimeo with the generous support of TypeCulture.

About Marta Bernstein

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Marta Bernstein is a designer, researcher, teacher and co-founder of the digital type foundry CAST. Type and typography are her true passions and the common threads of all her projects. She has a soft spot for 19th Century type, a topic she’s been researching for a decade. She’s given talks on various type topics at Typographics NYC, ATypI, The Letterform Archive, Typelab, Kerning Conference. She is a member of Nebiolo History Project, aiming to research archival evidence of Italy’s most renowned type foundry. Marta collaborates with international companies, start-ups and public institutions internationally. She has decade long experience in developing identities across various media, designing exhibitions, and signage systems. She is currently Associate Creative Director at Studio Matthews in Seattle. Her teaching roles have included: part-time faculty at USC Roski, adjunct professor in Typography at Milan’s Polytechnic University, visiting professor in Architecture and Design at the University of Navarra, and lecturer for the Interior Design master at Tongji University, Shanghai. Marta completed her B.Sc. & M.Sc. in Graphic Design at Milan’s Polytechnic and her M.Des in type design at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Follow Marta on Twitter and Instagram.