Catherine Dixon

Catherine Dixon is a designer, writer and teacher. As a designer she works mostly with text-based projects, including covers for the award-winning Great Ideas series for Penguin Books as well as complex book design work for a range of publishing clients. As a writer she has a particular interest in typeface design and the forms of letters more generally, contributing to the website <publiclettering.org.uk> and co-authoring with Phil Baines the book 'Signs: lettering in the environment'. She also writes for a range of typographic journals and magazines including Matrix, Eye magazine, Codex and new imprint Random Spectacular. She is a regular speaker at typography and design conferences around the world, a recent highlight being the opportunity to speak last year at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in the USA and has even appeared on the international radio station of Monocle magazine to talk about typography. She herself has helped to organize a number of typography and design-related events mainly for the famous St Bride Printing Library in London, including a series of 3 conferences exploring the contemporary relevance of letterpress, a theme also picked up in a series of recent commissions, personal projects and an exhibition. In addition to running numerous workshops and creative short courses in typography she is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design (CSM) in London where she herself first graduated in 1992 and later studied for her Doctorate, which explored issues around typeface classification. At CSM she teaches on the Graphic Communication Programme, supervises ongoing typographic research and co-curates The Central Lettering Record, an archive of lettering practices with an emphasis on architectural lettering, which forms part of the college’s Museum & Contemporary Collections. From 2011–12 she was a Visiting Professor at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.