Dr Fraser Muggeridge

The first exhibition of its kind dedicated to book spines, featuring over 100 spines from different genres of books: from children’s, graphic design to art books. The spine is the reader’s first encounter with a book when displayed on a bookshelf, usually with not much effort or imagination going into the design, using the standard sequence of author, title and publisher from top to bottom. This exhibition focuses on books that have considered the spine as part of the overall cover design or concept. Whether it’s the type of content, or how it is spatially arranged or bound together, these spines are the backbone to every book.

Imposed Alphabet consists of letters concealed on imposed printing sheets from various jobs designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio from 2018 to 2023. The shape, size, colour, and material of each letter refer to the design of the sheet that hosts it. Imposition is the process of arranging pages onto a printer’s sheet for maximum efficiency. Correct imposition minimises printing time, simplifies binding, and, by maximising the number of pages per impression, reduces paper waste.

Imposed Alphabet consists of letters concealed on imposed printing sheets from various jobs designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio from 2018 to 2023. The shape, size, colour, and material of each letter refer to the design of the sheet that hosts it. Imposition is the process of arranging pages onto a printer’s sheet for maximum efficiency. Correct imposition minimises printing time, simplifies binding, and, by maximising the number of pages per impression, reduces paper waste.

Imposed Alphabet consists of letters concealed on imposed printing sheets from various jobs designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio from 2018 to 2023. The shape, size, colour, and material of each letter refer to the design of the sheet that hosts it. Imposition is the process of arranging pages onto a printer’s sheet for maximum efficiency. Correct imposition minimises printing time, simplifies binding, and, by maximising the number of pages per impression, reduces paper waste.

mposed Alphabet consists of letters concealed on imposed printing sheets from various jobs designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio from 2018 to 2023. The shape, size, colour, and material of each letter refer to the design of the sheet that hosts it. Imposition is the process of arranging pages onto a printer’s sheet for maximum efficiency. Correct imposition minimises printing time, simplifies binding, and, by maximising the number of pages per impression, reduces paper waste.

Imposed Alphabet consists of letters concealed on imposed printing sheets from various jobs designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio from 2018 to 2023. The shape, size, colour, and material of each letter refer to the design of the sheet that hosts it. Imposition is the process of arranging pages onto a printer’s sheet for maximum efficiency. Correct imposition minimises printing time, simplifies binding, and, by maximising the number of pages per impression, reduces paper waste.

Holy, Holy, Holy: an exhibition of books with holes

Professor Fraser Muggeridge was invited to contribute a chapter entitled ‘A Knowing Wrongness’, based on a paper presented at the three-day conference, 'Typography Day' in Mumbai, India in 2018. A process of investigation The book edited by Nick Deakin and James Dyer is a collection of essays that investigated the following questions. What happens to a design after it has entered the world? What new meanings are generated from it? What unintended consequences come from its distribution? What unusual juxtapositions develop in a new context? How is it received differently, on the street by a pedestrian? What does it make us feel when it is removed from the slick, credited, studio portfolio website? leading to new insights With designers using the same tools, visual references, and production techniques, how can new graphic designs have elements of bespokeness or feel uniquely creative? I posed the question of a “knowing wrongness” of typographic experiment and print processes could lead to new forms of typographic practice. It is clear to see that the advance of readily available technology and the general awareness of graphic design over recent years has enabled anyone with basic software knowledge and little training to be competent at making a piece of visual communication. Designers and non-designers throughout the world are all using the same easy-to-use software and have access to the same new fonts. This, in combination with work being lifted and regurgitated from the internet with little or no concern for context, can lead to a uniform blandness with everything looking the same after a while. Effectively shared The book was shared and disseminated through Onomatopee, Einhoven, The Netherlands, and reviewed by Jarrett Fuller in Eye Magazine, No. 104 who commented on Muggeridge’s exploration of chance and play into design processes.

‘Workmanship of risk’, an idea formulated by David Pye in 1968, utilises any kind of technique or system ‘in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and care which the maker exercises as he works’. This is in contrast to the workmanship of certainty found in mass production, where the quality of the product is always predetermined before anything is actually made. Workmanship – the degree of skill with which a product is made, or a job done – plays a key role in my graphic design practice, as I am making a product and responsible for its design, production and delivery. The term ‘graphic designer’ first coined by William Dwiggins in 1922 and the growth of education since the mid-20th century formalised and supported the notion that design for print was a separate profession to that of manual printing. It has now reached the point of the 21st century creative critical multi-disciplinary designer who has a vast cultural understanding of all reference points, but struggles to get anything made, or can take pride and give any value to the quality of making. Craft has become seperated from the process of design. It seems that all the focus within the discipline has shifted towards the development, discussion and validation of a concept. The expertise needed to carry out such tasks is craft knowledge. This is gained through making and can be split into explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be readily articulated, codified, stored, accessed and shared. In my practice this is the understanding of the history of typography and graphic design, the history and recognition of typefaces, and how various print processes work. This is communicated to others as facts. Tacit knowledge is gained through experiences that can’t be easily articulated. It is the product of practice and the experience of repeating the same process again and again to build a complete understanding and mastery of one’s craft: material, tools and process. Richard Sennett has estimated that ten thousand hours is a common touchstone for how long it takes to become an expert, at forty hours per week, this amounts to five years. This is the time that complex skills become so engrained that they become subconsciously available as tacit knowledge and get played out in practice.

Talking about Spinorama Exhibition

Podcast talking about my PdD - A knowing Wrongness

Justified and unjustified setting (at the same time) 'the graphic designer today seems to feel that the typographic means at his disposal have been exhausted. accelerated by the speed of our time, a wish for new excitement is in the air. “new styles” are hopefully expected to appear.’ Herbert Bayer, 1967. Visual Communication, Architecture, Painting written and designed by Herbert Bayer published in 1967 by Reinhold and Studio Vista, collated Bayer's reflections on all three subjects, brought together at the end of a long career as a descriptive review. Alongside its content, its design and typesetting is of particular interest as the main text is set justified and unjustified at the same time within the same paragraph. The text is set justified but if the last word of a line doesn’t fit on the same line, then it is taken over to the next line, with the line above remaining unjustified. Totally logical, but totally odd. This method would have been possible to specify by the designer and perform by the typesetter (in this case graphic arts typographers inc.) in the technology dominant at the time, setting in galleys either in letterpress or film setting, then pasted up to form the pages. It’s a novel form that I have never seen before or after, inefficient as any text corrections would throw everything out, so it becomes line specific. It’s truly experimental and truly Bayer. This paper discusses forms of typesetting from innovative, unconventional and inefficient, to accepted norms and conventions, to those specific to geographically defined dogmas, as well as the various graphical devices used to indicate the start of a paragraph and the end of a line. These are described in relation to when they were made, culture of place, typesetting equipment, efficiency of production and their relevance to the discourse today. As a typographer, the historical precedents, conventions and meanings have a bearing on the choice of setting. Since the demise of specifying type to a typesetter, the designer is in control and responsible for this, more creative options are possible. These decisions can be equally as important as all the other decisions a typographer makes when laying out text in any medium. Unjustified setting, where the space between each letter is consistent (as opposed to justified setting where word space is expanded or contracted to form an even right-hand edge) is a relatively new convention in the history of typography. Semi justified (therefore semi unjustified) was used by Eric Gill in his Essay on Typography, 1931. After the Second World a renewed optimism nurtured a modern vision of ‘form over function’, with unjustified growing in use, also with the rise of the typewriter for the preparation, and the printing of material. This method of typesetting is still rare in printed books and newspapers but accepted on screen devices.

Paul Stuff wrote in 1996 that ‘Typographic knowledge is not formally stated, is given to aphoristic expression, and is in this sense relatively inarticulate. It is got through a form of apprenticeship and is passed on more or less intact from one generation of practitioners to the next.’ (1) A quarter of a century later, John-Patrick Hartnett put forward a different proposition. 'Art and design pedagogy is generally agreed today on the imperative for educators to facilitate independent learning instead of instructing students, but there remains wide debate about the most effective ways to achieve this goal. How best to impart knowledge without imposing a point of view?’ (2) This presentation will discuss the shift in typographic teaching since 1995, from a apprenticeship (tacit) learning model to independent learning. From the viewpoint of a typographer, teacher and employer (running my own studio since 2001) I will attempt to describe these changes, how, why and the consequences of these changes for graduating students. I will include case of recent graduates. I will make suggestions as to how does the teacher teach. How does the student learn? What are the assignments and how is typography taught through them? What is the criteria to evaluate the work produced? 1. Paul Stiff, “Instructing the printer: What specification tells about typographic designing,” Typography Papers 1 (1996): 29. 2. John-Patrick Hartnett, “Read and destroy: Review of A “New” Program for Graphic Design by David Reinsert, Eye no. 101 vol. 26, 2021. 113-4

This presentation focuses on the development of analogue printing techniques, predominantly interfering with offset lithography and its unpredictability, as a creative process. The purpose for this is to find new combinations of design and production techniques that can visually inform graphic design from a knowingly wrong standpoint. The experimentation, refinement, and repetition of a particular technique is unique to me and my practice and separates my work from that of the rest of the field of contemporary design. This aligns with James O’Brien’s statement: ‘This drive for newness in technique, in shapes, in materials, is quite compatible with contemporary thinking.’ Image making through printmaking is created without pre-prepared artwork, but made through the printmaking process itself, refining a technique in production and repeating this sequence. It is a joining of the roles of the designer and printer, roles that have become separated in the past century. Designers are perceived as artistically orientated, while printers concentrate on technically orientated tasks. My contribution is to rejoin the two sets of thinking together through a set of decisions made via the print process. My move towards printmaking has happened through working for and with artists on prints and editions, and through creative opportunities arising from cultural institution commissions. As the production of print moves towards standardisation and automation, my physical re-engagement with print in both a graphic design and a printmaking context has formed a unique entanglement of the two disciplines. I am aiming to discover novel approaches and techniques, the results of which I can use in my commercial practice. As described by Tony White: ‘The process unfolds through a series of controlled experiments. This is our delight and our challenge. The final image is the visible consequence of all our decisions.’ Graphic design is the practice of planning and communicating ideas and concepts through visual form and tactile qualities. Traditionally print-based, it now encapsulates all types of media, from physical to virtual on any surface. I make many decisions in my practice, to enable the product I am designing to communicate a feeling, an ‘emotion’. Whether literal or abstract, designs portray a message through a visual language that is controlled. The designer is the transformer of the message in this process. Printing can be a creative process that has many common associations with graphic design. To borrow the American graphic designer and printer Philip Zimmermann’s phrase, ‘production not reproduction’ it often is thought of as process based, rather than ideas or concept based. Can a communicative concept be arrived at primarily through an investigation of a print process? Ink, colour, form, constraints and possibilities all contribute to the creation or the ‘design’ of an image or print. Graphic image making through a dialogue with the press is increasingly becoming an important aspect of my practice. This is produced through DIY print processes, unique print making techniques that I have developed, and interventions with rotary offset lithography. These prints or images certainly have an ‘emotion’ unique to this media. Can graphic design be thought of as print making, and can print making be thought of as graphic design? Certain elements can be borrowed from the process of print making to become useful tools for the graphic designer, and vice versa. . James Francis O’Brien, Design by Accident (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 2. . Tony White, “From the Guest Editor,” The Journal of Artists’ Books 25 (2009): 63. . Production, Not Reproduction: Offset Printed Artist Books, (New York: The Center For Book Arts, 2007), 7.

Collection of print outs from 2017 -2025

Practice Talk based on Phd