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Ben Freeman and Annabel Fraser
Type Club

Books about typography are all well and good but you can’t beat getting your hands dirty around the cutting and sticking table for a dose of communal type-related bonding. This is the belief that inspired RCA students Ben Freeman and Annabel Fraser to start Type Club earlier this year. It has been a weekly event for several months but came into its own at the RCA graduate show, where it ran a series of events in the Big Top atmosphere in Hyde Park.

Both Emma Thomas from APFEL and Maki Suzuki from Abake joined in by leading workshops. Thomas brought along a huge collection of woodcut lettering books and a pile of printed Bodoni alphabets to inspire the attendant type enthusiasts to create glyph-based bunting for the huge RCA tent. Suzuki also took his lead from the surroundings, this time sending participants off into the exhibition to look for typefaces and stories before leading a lively discussion about the use of type in the context of an exhibition. To round off the proceedings Freeman and Fraser ran a workshop to write a thirty-three-letter pangram.

“As night closed in,” Freeman recalls, “attention levels shortened and some highly ‘experimental’ letters resulted.”

If typo japes of that variety tickle your fancy you can catch further Type Club workshops featuring special guests throughout 2007, with the next one at the V&A in September. Being typo nerd doesn’t have to mean huddling alone over specimen books in your bedroom. Get out and play with the other letter-inclined kids…

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