Banham was born in Melbourne in 1968. In 2003 he completed a Master of Design (Research) and in 2019 was awarded a PhD for his work on the proposition of the 'typographic lens'. Banham has been lecturing in the field of typography since 1990.
In 1991 he printed the first small issue of Qwerty, the first in a series of six experimental spiral-bound issues.[1]
Qwerty Issue 1, For those who get their fingers dirty (1991)
Banham has also been a contributor to, or featured in, design publications including Baseline magazine, Emigre, Adbusters, Face, Typo, Eye, Monument, Desktop, Grafik, Comma amongst others. He has spoken at design events in New York, Lebanon, Qatar, New Zealand, England, Spain and Australia. In 2011 he was inducted into the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD).
Professional research
In 1996 he produced Ampersand the first of a five-part series by the same name. These featured extended texts on the social significance of typography not possible in the small A7 format of Qwerty. This was then followed by Rentfont (1997) featuring an experimental typeface Futures, made entirely from logotypes. In 1998 Banham produced Convoy, a comment on the commodification of graphic design. Assembly (1999) was an exploration of the visual memory of a child in relation to corporate identity. This involved the individual interviewing over 600 schoolchildren. Grand (2001) investigated the relationship between typefaces and socio-economic environments by noting and analysing every instance of typography across a 1000 metre area of the Melbourne central business district.
In 2005 Banham began a series of forum events discussing the social role of typography and graphic design. Known as Character these events were held alongside the State of Design Festivals attracting up to 500 people at a time. These events took a different form each year. First appearing as an open discussion format looking into the branding of cities (2005), The politics of graphic design (2005), The role of accident in design (2006) and 26 Letters a Second – typography and the moving image (2007) which featured the Australian premiere of Helvetica, including a discussion with Gary Hustwit who was brought out for the event. In 2008 The fifth Character event saw the publishing of Characters and Spaces in partnership with the State of Design Festival. This free booklet, bound within the festival program, featured one city block of Melbourne's design secrets from the stories behind corporate identities through to art and architecture. Character 6 (2010) saw the Australian premiere of the documentary film TypeFace from Chicago, along with a discussion on the 'slow design' movement in graphic design and the resurgence in craft.
After three years or writing and research, Thames and Hudson published Characters: Revealing cultural stories through typography' (2011) Stephen Banham's extensive look into the cultural significance of typography with an emphasis on the most public of typographic forms, signage. Although the book uses Melbourne as its case study, the idea of viewing a city through a 'typographic lens' is a universal one. The book was co-published by the State Library of Victoria. In 2011 Banham was made a Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria.
In 2012 Banham curated and designed Cluster' an exhibition exploring the thematic 'clusters' of street naming. With this project he proposed that this was in fact one of the first forms of 'urban branding' in that it was aspirational in tone. As part of the 2015 Melbourne Festival he was selected one of the Melbourne Art Trams, on which he featured an assortment of these cluster forms. His interest in this is both typographic (as they are glyph-like forms) as well as cartographic (as they are map-like forms).
From 2008 onwards, Banham has produced the typographically themed Oblique series. Orbit Oblique (2008) was a typographic tribute to the animals lost in space research (1949–1990) during the space race. The second Utopia Oblique (2009) was based around the utopians who have used language and/or typography to express their ideal notion of society. In 2016 he published Cashcow Oblique, which centred on a typographic survey of the marks used by real estate developers through the current real-estate boom. It took the form of a poster, folded down to a small book format. 1000 copies were printed and distributed free all across Melbourne.
Throughout 2018 Banham designed 200 square metres of bronze typography for Brisbane Anzac Square, featuring special 'OO' ligatures, indicative of the Queensland town names that are listed across these commemorative screens. In the same year, Banham was the designer in a team of three academics who produced Sans Forgetica, the first typeface to have been designed along the psychological principles of 'desirable difficulty' and 'disfluency' in order to trigger memory whilst reading small passages of text. As Banham states 'Within the typeface design we have incorporated two key elements – an unconventional back-slant along with gapping, designed to anticipate the reader’s desire to complete the letter-shapes. This is what makes this typeface memorable and unique'. This continues to be a research trajectory for Banham and his colleagues.
Custom Typography for Brisbane Anzac Square (2018)Sans Forgetica typeface (2019)The 2015 Melbourne Festival Art Tram, Cluster.Characters – Cultural stories revealed through typography, Thames and Hudson (2011)Orbit Oblique (2008)Character 4, The Australian Premiere of Helvetica, ACMI Cinemas (2007)Character 4 Invitations featuring letterbox typeface Morice
Typographic design
Letterbox has operated a micro-foundry since 1996 producing a wide variety of typefaces including Berber, Terital United and Kevlar (with Wendy Ellerton), Morice (with Morice Kastoun), Bisque (With Niels Oeltjen), League (with Niels Oeltjen), Gordon and Brunswick Black (with Lan Huang and Clair Ghyzel). The studio has undertaken many bespoke typefaces for clients including Virgin Money, Argyle Pink Diamonds and the University of West Australia (UWA).
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below.
A typeface is a design of letters, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
Jan Tschichold was a German calligrapher, typographer and book designer. He played a significant role in the development of graphic design in the 20th century – first, by developing and promoting principles of typographic modernism, and subsequently idealizing conservative typographic structures. His direction of the visual identity of Penguin Books in the decade following World War II served as a model for the burgeoning design practice of planning corporate identity programs. He also designed the typeface Sabon.
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used typefaces.
Frutiger is a series of typefaces named after its Swiss designer, Adrian Frutiger. Frutiger is a humanist sans-serif typeface, intended to be clear and highly legible at a distance or at small text sizes. A popular design worldwide, type designer Steve Matteson described its structure as "the best choice for legibility in pretty much any situation" at small text sizes, while Erik Spiekermann named it as "the best general typeface ever".
In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Along with blackletter and roman type, it served as one of the major typefaces in the history of Western typography.
Univers is a large sans-serif typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger and released by his employer Deberny & Peignot in 1957. Classified as a neo-grotesque sans-serif, one based on the model of nineteenth-century German typefaces such as Akzidenz-Grotesk, it was notable for its availability from the moment of its launch in a comprehensive range of weights and widths. The original marketing for Univers deliberately referenced the periodic table to emphasise its scope.
Emigre, Inc., doing business as Emigre Fonts, is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1985 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry grew out of Emigre magazine, a publication founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends who met in San Francisco, CA in 1984. Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents.
Emigre was a (mostly) quarterly magazine published from 1984 until 2005 in Berkeley, California, dedicated to visual communication, graphic design, typography, and design criticism. Produced by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, Emigre was known for creating some of the very first digital layouts and typeface designs. Exposure to Licko's typefaces through the magazine lead to the creation of Emigre Fonts in 1985.
Zuzana Licko is a Slovak-born American type designer and visual artist known for co-founding Emigre Fonts, a digital type foundry in Berkeley, CA. She has designed and produced numerous digital typefaces including the popular Mrs Eaves, Modula, Filosofia, and Matrix. As a corresponding interest she also creates ceramic sculptures and jacquard weavings.
The International Typographic Style is a systemic approach to graphic design that emerged during the 1930s – 1950s but continued to develop internationally. It is considered the basis of the Swiss style. It expanded on and formalized the modernist typographic innovations of the 1920s that emerged in part out of art movements such as Constructivism (Russia), De Stijl and at the Bauhaus (Germany). The International Typographic Style has had profound influence on graphic design as a part of the modernist movement, impacting many design-related fields including architecture and art. It emphasizes simplicity, clarity, readability, and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica, and flush left, ragged right text. The style is also associated with a preference for photography in place of illustrations or drawings. Many of the early International Typographic Style works featured typography as a primary design element in addition to its use in text, and it is for this that the style is named. The influences of this graphic movement can still be seen in design strategy and theory to this day.
Herbert F. Lubalin was an American graphic designer. He collaborated with Ralph Ginzburg on three of Ginzburg's magazines: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde. He designed the typeface, ITC Avant Garde, for the last of these.
Modern typographers view typography as a craft with a very long history tracing its origins back to the first punches and dies used to make seals and coinage currency in ancient times. The basic elements of typography are at least as old as civilization and the earliest writing systems—a series of key developments that were eventually drawn together into one systematic craft. While woodblock printing and movable type had precedents in East Asia, typography in the Western world developed after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. The initial spread of printing throughout Germany and Italy led to the enduring legacy and continued use of blackletter, roman, and italic types.
Emil Ruder was a Swiss typographer and graphic designer, who with Armin Hofmann joined the faculty of the Schule für Gestaltung Basel. One of the main masters of Swiss design.
FF Scala is an old-style serif typeface designed by Dutch typeface designer Martin Majoor in 1991 for the Muziekcentrum Vredenburg in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The FF Scala font family was named for the Teatro alla Scala (1776–78) in Milan, Italy. Like many contemporary Dutch serif faces, FF Scala is not an academic revival of a single historic typeface but shows influences of several historic models. Similarities can be seen with William Addison Dwiggins' 1935 design for the typeface Electra in its clarity of form, and rhythmic, highly calligraphic italics. Eric Gill's 1931 typeface Joanna, with its old style armature but nearly square serifs, is also similar in its nearly mono-weighted stroke width.
Sumner Stone is a typeface designer and graphic artist. He notably designed ITC Stone while working for Adobe. A specimen of ITC Stone is shown at his personal website.
Martin Majoor is a Dutch type designer and graphic designer. As of 2006, he had worked since 1997 in both Arnhem, Netherlands, and Warsaw, Poland.
Erik van Blokland is a Dutch typeface designer, educator and computer programmer. He is the head of the Type Media Master of Design program in Typeface Design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in the Netherlands.
Alan Kitching RDI AGI Hon FRCA is a practitioner of letterpress typographic design and printmaking. Kitching exhibits and lectures across the globe, and is known for his expressive use of wood and metal letterforms in commissions and limited-edition prints.
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