Beginning with Codex 3, we are pleased to announce that the journal will have an editorial board comprised of eminent figures in the fields of graphic design and typography, type design, type and printing history, and typographic education. The members, whose biographies are listed below, represent a cross-section of the letterphile world. They are a diverse lot, in terms of age, gender and geography, but also in their aesthetic stances. We expect their advice and involvement with Codex will make for a richer publication in the future.
John Boardley, publisher
Paul Shaw, editor
Patricia Belen
Patricia Belen, a New York native, is a designer and partner at Kind Company, an independent design office in New York City since 2004. Since 2009, she has been documenting historically significant work and archives, with an emphasis on mid-century design, for Display, the initiative she established with Greg D’Onofrio. She has taught at the Fashion Institute of Technology and guest lectured at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts MFA in Design Criticism program. Patricia has a B.A. in architecture from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Peter Biľak
Peter Bilak was born in Czechoslovakia and lives in the Netherlands. He works in the fields of editorial, graphic, and type design; and teaches in the Type & Media postgraduate course at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. He started Typotheque in 1999, Dot Dot Dot magazine in 2000, Indian Type Foundry in 2009, and Works That Work magazine in 2012. His typefaces include Fedra and Greta. He is a member of AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale).
James Clough
James Clough studied typography at the London College of Printing. In 1971, after a spell as a designer in London, he moved to Milan where he set up as a freelance designer, specializing in lettering and calligraphy. He writes for Italian and international publications on themes concerning the history of type and the graphic arts. He teaches typography and the history of letterforms (epigraphy, calligraphy and type) in the Milan Politecnico University and other Italian institutions and has also lectured in Britain, Switzerland, the USA and Turkey. His research into the history of Italian wood type will be published by the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione.
Catherine Dixon
Catherine Dixon is a designer, writer and teacher based in London. As a designer she works mostly with text-based projects, including covers for the award-winning Great Ideas series for Penguin Books. As a writer she has a particular interest in type design and the forms of letters more generally. She was the researcher on A Survey of Letterforms, the Central Lettering Record prototype CD-ROM that broke new ground in the classification of typefaces. With Phil Baines she co-authored Signs: Lettering in the Environment and works on the website publiclettering.org.uk and curates The Central Lettering Record. She is a Senior Lecturer in Typography at Central Saint Martins where she herself graduated in 1992. In 2011 was a Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
Greg D’Onofrio
Greg D’Onofrio is a designer, writer and partner at Kind Company. He initiated the website Alvin Lustig, Modern Design Pioneer (alvinlustig.com/) and, with his partner Patricia Belen, co-founded Display, a platform for research in graphic design history. Greg has co-authored essays on Pirelli, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Yves Zimmermann and Bob Noorda. He is currently working on organizing and designing a catalogue for the design archives of Philip Grushkin, an American designer noted for his bookjackets and, later, his design of art history books.
Jost Hochuli
Jost Hochuli was born in 1933 in St. Gallen, Switzerland. He studied with Walter Kaech in Zurich and, briefly, with Adrian Frutiger in Paris. Since 1959 he has run his own commercial graphics and book design firm in St.Gallen. In 1979 he co-founded the cooperative publishing firm VGS and for twenty-five years he served as its president and designer. He has taught lettering, writing and typography at design schools in Zurich and St. Gallen. He designed and published the annual Typotron booklet series from 1983 until 1998; and, since 2000, the Edition Ostschweiz series. Jost is the author of Detail in Typography and Designing Books: Practice and Theory.
Alastair Johnston
Johnston, born in Glasgow, Scotland, combines his love of language and letterforms in the study of typography. He became a letterpress printer in 1970 and established the Poltroon Press in 1975 with the artist Frances Butler. He has published bibliographies of three San Francisco Bay Area literary small presses, translated and published Hendrik Vervliet’s monograph on Granjon: Cyrillic & Oriental typography in Rome, and Jan Tschichold’s essay on Jacob Sabon. His other books include Alphabets to Order, a study of typefounders’ specimens considered as literature, Nineteenth-century American designers and engravers of type (co-edited with Stephen O. Saxe, 2009), and Rambling in the Vernacular, a study of folk letterforms. He has just completed Transitional Faces: The Lives and Work of Richard Austin, type-cutter, & Richard Turner Austin, wood-engraver. He edited The Ampersand, a book arts journal, for fifteen years and contributed to Fine Print and Bookways. He writes a weekly column for booktryst, an online blo.
Scott-Martin Kosofsky
Scott-Martin Kosofsky, a partner in The Philidor Company, designs, produces, edits, composes, writes, and makes types for books. His specialties are complex typographic books, advanced typography for liturgical and biblical Hebrew, and interesting image-based books, with occasional forays into music, art, and graphic design. He specializes in books on Jewish subjects, most notably Printing the Talmud, The Jews of Boston (2005), Mahzor Lev Shalem (2010), the new High Holidays prayerbook for the Rabbinical Assembly, and The Book of Customs: A Complete Handbook for the Jewish Year (2004), his first book as sole author. His Hebrew type, “Milon,” made for Mahzor Lev Shalem, marked a technological breakthrough as well as an æsthetic one and led to a consultancy with Adobe. Recently, Scott completed work on a set of fonts begun by Matthew Carter, based on Guillaume Le Bé’s Hebrews. They will appear in 2014 in the first volume of The Oxford Hebrew Bible.
Indra Kupferschmid
Indra Kupferschmid is a German typographer and teacher at HBKsaar, Academy of Fine Arts Saarbrücken, where she holds a professorship in typography. Alongside this she is occupied with book design, bitmap fonts and other type related projects, DIN committees on legibility and type classification, terminology, the history of Grotesks and how this is all intertwined. She is the co-author of Helvetica Forever (2007) and author of Buchstaben kommen selten allein, a typographic reference book. She contributes to fontsinuse, typedia and typographica among other publications and websites.
Mathieu Lommen
Mathieu Lommen is a curator of graphic design and typography at the Bijzondere Collecties (Special Collections) of the University of Amsterdam and teaches graphic design history at the UvA. He has published multiple works on the history of book and type design from the nineteenth century onwards. Among his books are Dutch typefounders’ specimens from the Library of the KVB (together with John A. Lane, 1998) and The book of books: 500 years of graphic innovation (2012). He has contributed articles to several journals and was formerly an editor of Quaerendo, a Dutch journal on the history of European books and manuscripts.
Sébastien Morlighem
Sébastien Morlighem studied at the École Supérieure Estienne (Paris, France), where he learned type design. He has worked since 1995 as a graphic designer for books and records. He teaches the history of graphic design and typography and is coordinator of the post-graduate program ‘Typography and Language’ at the École supérieure d’art et de design in Amiens. He created the Bibliothèque typographique collection for Ypsilon Éditeur and has co-authored books about French type designers José Mendoza y Almeida and Roger Excoffon. He collaborates frequently with Eye and Étapes magazines and lectures in many countries. He is currently completing a PhD research project for the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading (United Kingdom).
James Mosley
James Mosley, the former librarian of the St. Bride Printing Library and the founding editor of the Journal of the Printing Historical Society, is a printing historian. He teaches in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communications at the University of Reading and at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. James lectures at conferences in England, France, Germany, Italy and the United States. He is the author of numerous essays on printing and type, including “Trajan Revived” (1964) and the seminal “The Nymph and the Grot” (1965 and updated as a book in 1999). He has contributed to books on Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune, the Romain du Roi, the Imprimerie Nationale, Louis Pouchée and more. His blog Typefoundry is one of the most respected on the subject of type and typography on the Internet.
Helmut Schmid
Helmut Schmid, born 1942 in Ferlach, Austria, served an apprenticeship as a compositor in Weil am Rhein, Germany. He studied typography under Emil Ruder and graphic form under Kurt Hauert at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland. He has written articles for Grafisk Revy, TM, Idea, and Baseline. Since 1981 he has lived in Osaka, Japan where he works as a freelance designer. He has taught typography workshops in Japan, India, Korea and Singapore. Helmut is the editor and designer of typography today (1980/2003), the road to basel (1997), ruder typography ruder philosophy (idea 333, 2009), and japan japanese (robundo, 2012).
Sponsored by H&FJ.
Codex Editorial Board