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Sydney J. Shep is Senior Lecturer in Print & Book Culture at Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. She is a trained letterpress printer, book artist and designer bookbinder who runs Wai-te-ata Press | Te Whare Ta O Aotearoa, Victoria University’s unique type laboratory used for teaching, research, and fine press letterpress editions. Sydney has researched and published on many aspects of typography and design as well as topics in New Zealand print culture. She also co-directs Silent Isle Press, a fine press and designer bookbinding establishment. Sydney has trained in her native Canada, New Zealand and Scotland in letterpress printing, printmaking and bookbinding. In addition to studio teaching, she researches and publishes on topics as diverse as paper history, biscuit typography, graffiti, and printing trade manuals.

 
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L E C T U R E | 0930h | 15.02.09 | view programme

‘Smile, you’re on candid camera’: Emoticons and expressive typography

Emoticons, or ‘smileys’ as they are popularly termed, are frequently considered the archetypal expression of the digital age. This illustrated talk traces their origins in nineteenth-century printing trade journals in which letterpress compositors engaged in exuberant displays of typographical architecture and graphic charactering. Using the various sorts of the typecase, compositors created physiognomic ciphers, which gave material form to the relationship between textual bodies, the human body, and typography. It brings the story into the present by investigating the role of emoticons as the human computer interface, and introduces a few unusual applications in everyday life, including a peculiarly Australasian reinvention of the jammie dodger. If, as Theodore Adorno reminds us, “history has left its residue in punctuation marks, and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation,” then the emoticon is a particularly good example of typographers giving voice and expression to the page, whether physical or digital.

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W O R K S H O P
Designing with Italics

Join Sydney Shep at Victoria University of Wellington’s own Wai-te-ata Press for a hands-on workshop focusing on the press’s unique collection of italic wood types. Shep will show you how to typeset and print, explore the letterpress style, and suggest novel ways of integrating letterpress into your contemporary design practice.

Click here to read about the Sydney Shep workshop

FOR MORE >> www.victoria.ac.nz/wtapress/
 

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