File Under presents Markus Rathgeb, Rick Poynor and Robin Kinross

FILE UNDER:
Design monographs
Otl Aicher
Jan van Toorn
Anthony Froshaug

MARKUS RATHGEB
RICK POYNOR
ROBIN KINROSS
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Performing Arts Lab
Stevens Building – 1st floor
3.30pm

Poster by Ray O’Meara and Mark El-khatib.

Markus Rathgeb was educated as a graphic designer in Germany, Australia and the UK. He moved to London in 1997 to co-found alligator design and started a Ph.D. research at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. After completing his Ph.D. dissertation, “Otl Aicher: Design as a Method of Action” in 2001 he moved back to Germany to help establishing the Department of Mediadesign in Ravensburg, being the first design course at the University of Cooperative Education in Germany, where he is currently Head of Department and lectures applied design methods.

Rick Poynor is a writer on design, media and visual culture. He was the founding editor of Eye magazine, and is a contributing editor and columnist of Print magazine in New York. In 2003 he co-founded Design Observer, which rapidly became a leading design weblog. He lectures internationally on design matters and has been a Visiting Professor and a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2002 he researched and edited a special issue of Eye about Australian graphic design. Poynor’s books include Typographica (2001), Obey the Giant (2001), an essay collection, No More Rules (2003), a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism, and Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties (2004) to accompany the Communicate exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, which he curated. His most recent book is Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008), a study of the radical Dutch designer.

Robin Kinross. After graduating (1975) and postgraduating (1979) from the Department of Typography at the University of Reading, he began to do ‘editorial typography’ (editing and design in one process) as well as write about typography. In 1980, while still living in Reading, he published the first book under the imprint of Hyphen Press: What is a designer by Norman Potter. In 1982 he moved to London, did behind-the-scenes work for Pluto Press’s political atlases and began to write journalism, especially for the magazine Blueprint in its golden period of the late 1980s. When his book Modern typography came out in 1992, this signalled the start of Hyphen Press as the full-time occupation that it is now. Impatient with authors slow to complete promised works, he resorted to publishing his own words again in the books Unjustified texts (2002) and The transformer (2009).