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Noel Waite is a Senior Lecturer in Design Studies at the University of Otago. His research seeks to integrate New Zealand design history, exhibition design and print culture. He has recently published Books for a Nation: The Whitcoulls Story, and is currently writing a history of New Zealand design. Poet Denis Glover joked that typography is ‘just a matter of small points’, but Waite’s interest is in connecting significant historical points of typographical interest with contemporary practices and future theories of communication design.

 
FOR MORE >> www.design.otago.ac.nz 

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Typographic Translation: 26 soldiers of lead and their distribution in New Zealand 1834-1984

 
Typography is a field of design history that cannot be comfortably contained within the conventional limits of industrial society because the development of printing and typography are inextricably linked - except in New Zealand, where it arrived, almost fully formed as part of the industrial printing process. Noel Waite will trace the evolution of typography in New Zealand over 150 years and argue that typographic precedents have been liberally interpreted and translated, and the result is a rich and diverse tradition that challenges conventional expectations about the evolution of modern typography. The translation service began with Missionary printer William Colenso’s design of the Maori case lay that provided a manifest meeting point of 2 cultures-a colonial print culture and an indigenous Maori oral culture. One of the many unexpected results of this exchange was the establishment of an influential international journal ‘devoted to the advancement of the typographic art’ by Robert Coupland Harding in 1887. In the 1930s, poet Denis Glover and artist Leo Bensemann put typography at the centre of a cultural nationalist movement, where it has remained ever since. The distribution of printing to and within New Zealand was a function of both colonialism and industrialisation, but a critical typographic culture has developed here that disrupts and challenges linear colonial communication models. This survey will seek to shed light on the importance of typography to the development of a New Zealand print culture. The resulting matrix is one that is accommodating of international developments and where many voices can be heard in this meeting place of the most social of arts and the scientific precision required to master what Glover joked was a ‘matter of small points’.  

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About the images
“The Dunedin Sound Seen” exhibition of Flying Nun posters and album cover design, Hocken Collections Galleries 24 Feb-24 Mar 2007, part of 3rd-year Design Studies paper at Otago University | OLD SCHOOL : NEW SCHOOL : TRUETYPE SCHOOL. Waite convened this symposium on the past, present and future of typography 15-17 Aug 2005, which was supported by Department of Design Studies, A History of Print Culture in New Zealand Area of Research Strength, University of Otago, and Designers Institute of New Zealand. Stuart Medley designed the poster, which was selected for Grids: Creative Solutions for Graphic Designers (Rotovision, 2007)

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