Workshop - Typography with Rupert Bassett

Yesterday I spent the whole day in a typographic workshop with our semi-resident type guru Rupert Bassett. He kicked the session off by showing us his collection of corporate branding guides. There was a rather lovely big hardback for the RAC which he worked on back in the 90s. It was incredibly anal, as you might expect, with for example a whole page dedicated to showing the exact shade of white that can be used by the RAC. Similar pages set out the use of orange, blue, etc. The whole thing was beautifully put together and Rupert told us that it cost a fortune to make, as each copy required the printing of loads of spot colours and special finishes like UV varnish.

There was a fantastic slip-case that contained envelopes with style cards for each of the teams in the NFL. They looked like they were from the seventies at the very latest (I noticed the Washington Redskins logo was different to any I have ever seen) and Rupert said he picked it up really cheap at a second-hand book store in New York. The other highlight was the brilliant NASA style guide, which he was given by a friend. He said that he had subsequently been offered a "four-figure sum" for it by another designer. It is a very cool thing.

After browsing these treasures for a while, Rupert informed us that our task was to create a brand guide for the Typography Workshop that we were currently involved in. Excellent. I set to work straight away, bashing out a bunch of initial ideas:



I got a bit hung up on the whole German thing, which was really just a bit of an in-joke because it is very much Rupert's kind of thing. I rather like the one right in the middle in Comic Sans, the ironic use of which would instantly be apparent to anyone attending a typography workshop. No?

I had one more daft idea to get out of my head before I could move on:



Anyway, I then started playing around with the letter T, duplicating and flipping it to see if it could also form a W. It does to a degree and I kind of like the way that it becomes more of an abstract mark:



Here are a couple of ideas that I developed from that initial experimentation:



Rupert suggested that I should try to make the mark work in a square, which is how I came up with this:



I definitely prefer the one to the left, with the text on one line. I thought it would make sense to also make a variation on the theme, where the text sits alongside the mark.



I think I am definitely onto something. Here's an example of the two variations working with a few different colours:



I am not sure whether to take this project any further at the moment. It would be nice to create an entire branding guide for the Typography Workshop but I am not sure I will have the time. If I were to do it I would want to cover at least the following:

• Typography guide
• Colour palette (TW Blue, TW Red, etc, with Pantone refs, CMYK, RGB and Web)
• Grid structure
• Photography usage guide
• Logotype usage guide (showing correct and incorrect usage examples)
• Poster design guide (A0, A1, A2, A3, A4 - show example posters of dream guest speakers)
• Billboard design guide
• Screen use
• Advertising
• Website
• Letterhead
• iPad
• Business card
• Uniform (staff and students)

I'll leave it there for the time being. However, here are a couple of poster ideas I came up with: