Our fantastic year at Reading is now complete, and the class of 2012 has dispersed to make way for the incoming students — a talented looking bunch judging by some of the websites I’ve seen.

The final weeks of term and the summer holiday flew past, with our typeface submitted towards the end of June, along with the Reflection on Practice that charts our progress and explains our decisions. The summer months saw us fully absorbed in research and writing, with everyone working their hardest and going about with anguished dissertation faces. Oddly enough, at the start of the course, the dissertation was the one part I was not looking forward to, but my topic — Burmese printing types — is an area that has not been studied before, making it extremely rewarding to pull together the histories into a coherent narrative. The amount of material covered was quite astonishing, as the topic covers two hundred years of printing, and involved multiple visits to London’s libraries, a whole lot of Googling and careful examination of type specimens to see how the metal types were composed. Hopefully I’ll be sharing some of the interesting parts in a future blog post, since the story of Burmese type parallels the developments in type of every other world script, and was at least for me, very enlightening.

I’m now back in Sussex, working on freelance commissions. I’ve got three typeface projects on the go, and graphic design jobs to fill up the gaps, so I plan to keep this blog going as I develop and produce more work. As one typophile said, the Masters is just a beginning 🙂