Award-winning typeface designer Nina Stössinger to speak at Austin Peay
(Posted Oct. 21, 2019)
The Department of Art + Design, with support from the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts, is pleased to welcome award-winning typeface designer Nina Stössinger to Austin Peay State University.
“Stössinger is a senior typeface designer at Frere-Jones Type in Brooklyn,” said Michael Dickins, chair of the Visiting Artist Speaker Committee. “She also teaches type design at Yale School of Art. We are really excited for her visit as she will be conducting workshops with our graphic design students as well as a lecture on her creative practice and her career as an award-winning designer. The workshop is yet another opportunity for our students to get one-on-one experience with one of the country’s top designers, all due to CECA and its continuous support.”
Stössinger’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 28, in the Art + Design building’s Room 120.
Originally from Switzerland, Stössinger studied multimedia design in Halle, Germany, and type design in Zurich and The Hague. She enjoys code and language, history and new ideas. She has spoken at many conferences and events, and her work has been awarded numerous prizes and exhibited internationally.
Her published retail type designs include Empirica and Conductor (both designed with Tobias Frere-Jones), Nordvest and FF Ernestine. She co-designed custom typefaces (also with Frere-Jones) for clients including the Essex Market and Academy Sports + Outdoors.
“As someone who makes typefaces, I see myself as a designer, a craftsperson and sometimes a scholar,” Stössinger said. “I draw much inspiration from the centuries-old history of type design and other disciplines concerned with the shaping of letters; as well as from their multifaceted present. I learn, read and look voraciously. I cultivate an inclusive understanding of visual culture, taking inspiration from both the established and the vernacular, highbrow and lowbrow modes of communication, those familiar and those foreign to me. And honoring the history of type to me does not mean blindly recreating established forms tied to specific historical contexts, technologies or tools. I enjoy recombining ideas and gently pushing the boundaries of convention – while remaining careful to honor our cultural agreement on what the shapes of the alphabet look like.”
Stössinger is based in Brooklyn, New York. For more on Stössinger and her work, visit www.ninastoessinger.com.
For more on this lecture, contact Dickins at dickinsm@apsu.edu. All ages are welcome.
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