New Updike Ceremony Poster by Peter Nowell

One of the unexpected pleasures of the Updike Prize for Student Type Design has been the posters. Ever since the first poster to launch the prize in 2014 (designed by Michael McDermott), we’ve been fortunate to launch a new poster for each prize ceremony, all designed by students or recent graduates and often by a participant in a previous competition.

This year’s poster was designed by the 2021 first prize co-winner Peter Nowell*, and uses his typeface Napoleon:

Peter describes the goal of the poster like this:

The poster design is a dance of contrasts, inspired by the themes of Katie’s talk and art practice—in particular, the relationship between words and images, words as images, and the interplay of chaos and order; helplessness and control. Faced with a messy world in which we have little control, we can find meaning in small, seemingly-insignificant acts of care. The daring plunge of expressing ourselves creatively. The timelessness of a thoughtfully-typeset paragraph. Or an evening of reflection and appreciation for the graphic arts. The poster aims to be a magnet for people who resonate with that spirit.

Here’s a look at posters from the past, and don’t forget to register for the free event on November 15th:

*More about Peter: Peter Nowell is an independent designer, educator, and entrepreneur based in San Francisco. Whether he’s crafting a typeface, composing a poster, or engineering a software, his meticulous approach prioritizes honest, elegant, human-centric solutions—from the vision to the smallest detail.

Save the Date: Katie Garth and the Updike Prize ceremony on November 15

We’re excited to announce that the guest speaker for the 2023 Updike Award Ceremony is Katie Garth! Katie is an artist and educator responsible for a lot of fascinating projects, and she’ll be discussing her trajectory toward and away from type and lettering in her work.

The Updike Prize is a biennial award for the best historically-informed student type design, and this will be our first in-person meeting since 2019. The event will begin at 5pm on November 15th at the Providence Public Library. It’s free to attend, but we do request that you RSVP via our website, where you’ll also find more information about Katie and the event.

Read more about the Updike Collection, and get in touch to schedule a visit of your own, as well as the Updike Prize on our website. And we’ll see you in November!

“Yes, type is sexy…”

We’re just over a week away from this year’s Updike Prize award ceremony, and we’re excited to welcome our featured speaker, Nina Stössinger, to Providence. If you want to get a head start and read a short article by Nina, try this one. Or maybe check out this interview with her and then follow her on Twitter.

But whatever you do, be sure to join us on Monday, October 23rd, at the RISD Metcalf Auditorium and hear from Nina in person!

Access for All

Moments of political turmoil are an opportunity for organizations to define what they really believe, and in January the American Library Association did just that with a statement titled, “ALA opposes new administration policies that contradict core values.”

We liked the statement so much we thought it deserved a chance to move off the screen and onto the page, so we teamed up with local letterpress printers DWRI Letterpress to create a broadside version of an excerpt of the statement. The text was set on one of the DWRI Linotype machines and printed by hand.

We’re going to post copies here at PPL, but we printed more than we’ll need, and we’re happy to share. If you’re interested in having a copy for your library, just contact us. We might even throw in a copy of our awesome new comic.

The finished broadside and the forme used to print it.

Congratulations to June Shin, Winner of the 2016 Updike Prize

On Monday evening we celebrated student type design with four talented finalists for our Updike Prize for Student Type Design. Here they are (with typeface names in italics):

June Shin, Ithaka (First Prize)

SooHee Cho, The Black Cat

Cem Eskinazi, Mond

Íñigo López Vázquez, Erik Text

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the event on Monday you can still see examples of the students’ work on display in our third floor exhibition area.

And if you’re an aspiring student type designer, it’s never too soon to start working on your entry for the 2017 prize. Contact us or stop in to ask about the contest.

Thanks to our sponsors, Paperworks, for making the prize possible. And thanks as well to Fiona Ross, this year’s guest speaker, who enlightened our audience on the topic of non-Latin type design.

Updike Award Ceremony 2016, Featuring Fiona Ross

I’m excited to announce that our speaker for the next Updike Award Ceremony will be Fiona Ross. Dr. Ross will be visiting us from the University of Reading, and she’ll be discussing her work on non-Latin alphabets.
 Fiona Ross is a pioneer in the field, beginning with over a decade at the helm of Linotype’s non-Latin font division. She recently received the Society of Typographic Aficionados’ Typography Award, among other honors.Dr. Ross’s lecture will take place as part of the ceremony to celebrate the finalists of our Updike Prize for Student Typography. The event, which will be accompanied by an exhibition of materials from our Updike Collection, begins at 5:30 PM on Monday, October 17th at the Providence Public Library.The event is free, but we request that anyone interested in attending RSVP at:

http://updike2016.eventbrite.com/

(Thanks to our fantastic sponsors, Paperworks!)

A Christmas Present from Japan

This is a long overdue post about a terrific gift we received in early January.

Big thanks to Akira Yoshino and Taro Yumiba (and others) who sent in a cache of great 20th-century Japanese type specimen books and ephemera. If you’re interested in taking a look, stop in during our open hours, or set up an appointment to visit.

 

Valerie Lester discusses Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World

Remember this guy?:

It’s been a year and a half since we celebrated Giambattista Bodoni and the 200th anniversary of his death. In all those years, no one has written a full-length English biography of the great printer and type designer – until now.

Join us at 6:00pm on Wednesday, October 7th for a lecture by Valerie Lester, whose biography of Bodoni is being published this month. Copies of the book will be available for purchase, and refreshments will be served. We’ll also have a selection of items from our collections of Bodoniana on display.

Congratulations to Sandra Carrera and our other Updike Prize finalists

It’s a pleasure to announce that Sandra Carrera is the first ever winner of the Updike Prize for Student Type Design!

You may have noticed that the trophy is also a fully-functional composing stick. We had a great evening with a lecture from Tobias Frere-Jones last Thursday, but if you missed it you can still visit the level 3 gallery cases to take a look at the type specimens of our four finalists:

Sandra Carrera, Picara (First Prize)
Chae Hun Kim, Hodoo
Prin Limphongpand, Rizvele (Runner-Up)
Yeon Hak Ryoo, Tranche

The specimens will be on display, with items from the Updike Collection that influenced the type design, until March 19th. Kudos to all four finalists who did a great job!

Picara, the winning typeface, was influenced by a type specimen published sometime in the 1770s by Antonio Espinosa, and we’re happy to announce that we’ve made the book available in its entirety online:

 

If you’re a student interested in type design, don’t forget that the 2016 competition starts now! Stop in to work with the collection or just learn more about it and the rules for the prize.

And if you want to be notified about next year’s Updike Prize ceremony, stay tuned to this blog, or send us your email address to be added to our mailing list.

Tobias Frere-Jones & the Updike Award

We’re now just under two weeks away from our big type event of the year, when Tobias Frere-Jones will be our guest speaker at an event to award our first ever Updike Prize for Student Type Design.

It should be a fantastic night, so put it on your calendar now: Thursday, February 19th at 6pm. You can get a sense of Tobias Frere-Jones’s engaging take on typographic history by visiting his terrific blog.

At 5:30 we’ll be offering a short tour of our latest exhibition, “Inhabited Alphabets,” which highlights some typographic oddities from our Updike Collection as well as our other collections including children’s books, Civil War items and more. The Washington Street entrance will be open starting at 5:15. The event is free and open to the public, but you’re welcome to RSVP on the Library’s website.

And that’s not all! If you’re a proper typographic enthusiast, you need a great typographic t-shirt, and we’ve got one for you:

Visit our Teespring campaign and order a t-shirt now. We’ve taken one of our favorite images from the current exhibition (from an 1838 Austin Letter Foundry specimen book) and turned it into a t-shirt that proclaims your typographic allegiance. Not only do you get a great shirt, but you also support Special Collections. The campaign runs through February 25th, so don’t delay. After that, they’re gone.

Thanks to Michael McDermott for once again designing the event poster featured at the top of this post. And thanks also to our event sponsor, Paperworks!