Timothy Donaldson

Timothy Donaldson is a letterworker: a practising graphic designer, type designer and action calligrapher with enthusiasm for the use, abuse and reuse of text as a communication device. He is the author of Shapes for sounds, a widely available treatise on the past, present and future of the Latin alphabet, and the first of a trilogy of interconnected monographs. He teaches via the media of the lecture, the seminar, the workshop, the demonstration and studio practice. He believes that graphic design is one of the most important methods we have for mediating our culture and is devoted to raising the world's awareness to match its ubiquity.

He was formed in the North West of England, an only child of Yorkshire parents. He developed an obsessive interest in drawing during his first decade which matured into another obsession with writing (still drawing) during his second one. During his third decade he was a journeyman signwriter, earning his crust in pursuit of the just forming of letters. By his fourth decade he had become a lettering artist and type designer and a lecturer in typography at Stafford School of Art & Design - a legendary destination for the teaching and learning of typography in England. After the challenging opportunity of balancing teaching, family life and freelance work with postgraduate study, he was awarded an MA by the University of Lincoln, who subsequently awarded him a Research Fellowship in Graphic Design enabling him to focus fully on his work with lettershapes and letterforms. This coincided with the emergence of his first writings on design and the publication of his first book, Shapes for Sounds.

He has lectured on graphic design internationally since the mid 1990s and designed over 40 typefaces for Adobe, FontShop International, The International Typeface Corporation and Letraset. On multiple occasions his typefaces have won the highest awards in the Morisawa international typeface design competition, Japan, and received awards in the Brno Biennale, Czech Republic. His writings in his field have been acclaimed and celebrated by The American Institute of Graphic Arts with their inclusion in two of its permanent national archives. He is well known for his ongoing experiments with tools and chirographic mark-making, particularly in large-scale performances which explore the convergences of group narratives, divergent orthographies, semiotics and action drawing. He continues to perform and lecture internationally, design typefaces and contribute to the global corpus of critical graphic design writing, and now teaches at Falmouth where he attempts to trace a meaningful path between the history, theory and practice of graphic design.