Catherine Dixon

Biography

Catherine Dixon is a designer, writer and teacher. As a designer she works mostly with text-based projects, including typographic covers for the award-winning ‘Great Ideas’ series for Penguin Books. As a writer she has a particular interest in type design and letterform, and her doctoral thesis, ‘A description framework for typeforms; an applied study’, focused on the problems of describing typefaces and went on to inform the CSM ‘Typeform dialogues’ project.

Catherine writes regularly on letterforms in environmental contexts, contributing to the website www.publiclettering.org.uk, and co-authored the book Signs: lettering in the environment with CSM Professor of Typography Phil Baines. She contributes to online design blogs and magazines including Eye, Random Spectacular, Matrix and Imprint on general typographic and education issues. She is a frequent speaker at international conferences, most recently presenting at TypoBerlin (2016), London Transport Museum (2016), Tipoteca Italiana (2015), and ATypI in São Paulo (2015), as well as organising design-related events, mostly in support of St Bride Library, London. Catherine has taught typography at Central Saint Martins since 1999, and in Spring 2011 took up a one-year post as a Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. With Phil Baines she co-curates the Central Lettering Record, part of the college’s Museum & Contemporary Collections.

The pragmatic concern with typeface description, which informed my doctoral research, now underpins the transformation of the more conceptual outcomes of my PhD into practical tools for helping students, especially to make sense of the formal diversity of typefaces currently available. Using analytical frameworks developed within information design I am looking at the use of graphic representation in the communication of classificatory strategy. Here research and teaching interests fuse through an engagement with the consideration of those not only making, but using and being shaped by typeface classifications.

Following publication of our co-authored book, my work with Phil Baines continues towards a critical documentation of public lettering, addressing the paucity of qualitative tools to critically evaluate the contribution public lettering makes to our sense of place.

More recent research has explored letterpress and articulations around its value as a teaching and learning tool, as well as the value of an emergent letterpress vernacular. This has since broadened into a consideration of the value of typographic workmanship within contemporary graphic communication design contexts.