The second day of Into the Fold brought more wealth of content and discussion. It saw Phil Baines give a talk about Grotesque typefaces and then a letterpress demonstration, Sam Winston running an interactive drawing project and Lynda Brockbank discussing the 99 Words project. 

British designer, typographer, writer and professor Phil Baines was in early in the morning, demonstrating and setting type downstairs in the Letterpress studio at Camberwell.  The impetus of his visit was borne from the Flaxman Semi-Bold typeface, designed by Edward Wright, and Camberwell being the only place holding this typeface in it's letterpress collection.  He worked on a poster of a quote from Re-make/Re-model by Michael Bracewell - using all Grotesque variants: Grot 19, Elongated Sans, Headline Bold and of course, Flaxman Semi-Bold. 

"The restrictions of spacing, the body and how type goes together become so blatantly obvious with letterpress that it helps to explain structures and the way type is constructed. If you’re interested in type design it’s really good, whatever the elasticity of the invisible em square. We always get our first-year students to draw letters with two pencils taped together. It’s incredible nowadays how many kids have not been taught how to hold a pencil properly – to the extent that they can’t draw. Not just letters; they can’t draw, at all, because they can’t handle a pencil. Staggering." 

- Quote from an Eye interview, here.

Sam Winston and Kate Smallshaw's This Is Not a Brief saw a mixed-discipline group of students leaving behind their pre-conceptions of what they do and what they expect a brief to ask of them, to complete a set of tasks surrounding the theme of finite creativity. The first scenario gave them twelve months left as ‘creatives’ and they had ten minutes to create a list of everything they would do in a year – their answers spanned world travel, publishing tomes and completing long pined for projects about cats. Scenario two offered up five urgent minutes to decipher their last-make with only 31 days left to create, and the final scenario saw them mastering a world with no tomorrows – with only twelve hours left, how would you leave your mark?

We have an emerging N O W made up of yellow, pink and blue post-its answering these questions on the front wall of Camberwell Space – wisdoms so far include: ‘abstract drawings’, ‘have lunch with my dads’, ‘a beautiful rug’ and in the words of Nike… ‘just do it’. We are halfway through the ‘O’ and have a bunch of post-its free for ideas from you.

Later on in the day, designer Lynda Brockbank brought in the book You Have Breath For No More Than 99 Words. What Would They Be? designed at Crescent Lodge, the consultancy she co-founded in 1986. A creatively led group comprising practitioners from multiple backgrounds and supported by technical and planning specialists, they work alongside their clients to make functional, purposeful and out of the ordinary communications.

99 Words raised similar ideas to those posed in Sam Winston’s non-brief – the problem, identified by the author Liz Gray in a quote from Robert Wyatt, of getting so out of touch that ‘words take the place of meaning’. Gray suggests that rather than being morbid she is proposing a re-assessment, and a device for choosing ninety-nine essential words.

Lynda went on to discuss work produced by Crescent Lodge for clients including BBC, Chelsea College of Art and Hackney Empire, showing innovative examples of solutions for deadlines, budgets and book design.