 for the very kind and deeply embarrassing introduction. That's my British side coming out. My Hungarian side would normally welcome it. Also for the invitation to present our project Women in Type here at TiteCon. And I would also like to express my heartfelt thanks to Nicole for stepping in for Alice and also offering to take on my words should my voice fail and I do apologize in advance for my coughing and if I suddenly have to flee here through a coughing spasm. Nicole, I think you wanted to say a couple of words. Yes, I just wanted to say that I'm here instead of Alice. I am as surprised as you are that I'm standing up here. I had imagined I would be in your place. So I'm gonna be giving Alice's portion of the presentation but it's gonna be coming through my mouth. So I hope I get it right but I may, the subtlety may be just a little bit different because Alice has a much deeper knowledge of this research than I do. And you offered to do it because you do believe in our project which was what she was telling me. So just to get that down, okay. So this is a University of Reading project which is funded by the Levy Hume Trust and it draws on our experiences as type historians and designers. And we're at about the halfway point of our research which runs for three years. And today the plan is to briefly outline the scope and objectives of the research before sharing some of our findings with you. And our aim, our principal aim is to provide the first socio-historical account of women's role in type drawing offices from 1910 to 1990 as experienced within the two leading type manufacturing companies in Britain, the Monotype Corporation and Linotype Limited. And our scope is defined by the formal setup of monotypes drawing office in 1910. And 1990 forms a natural conclusion because that's when the Monotype Corporation was about to go into receivership and Linotype to close its British operations. And of course this is also a period that saw great technological changes in the type industry. And is a period of immense socio-historical significance for British working women. Now I will say that we are actually also deeply interested in the activities and experiences of those who worked in the US sister drawing offices. But we're necessarily confining our research to the UK to ensure that we have a manageable three-year part-time project that is appropriately scaled in order to allow us to investigate the available archives in sufficient depth. Over to Nicole. So let's start at the top. What is the type drawing office? Throughout the 20th century type drawing offices were a very essential component of the industrial type making process. Initially their role was to produce letter drawings that were used in production of hot metal typefaces for the Linotype and Monotype composing systems. But beyond the hot metal era, reasonably sized type foundries would have most likely had their own drawing studios at some point. The size and the role of such departments would have varied however depending on the company. The period, the technology, et cetera. In the case of monotype and Linotype, the drawing offices were responsible for the following. They would take the designers original artwork and adapt it to a format that was suitable for their particular machines in essence. Sometimes they would convert existing typefaces either from their metal type or printed type specimens to hot metal. In this photo you can see she's actually enlarging a piece of metal type to create the 10-inch drawings. The 10-inch drawings were the basically final design, final drawings were the basically master from which the type was produced. Later the same type of conversion happened but for phototype and digital type. They also expanded character sets, adding punctuation, symbols, accented characters, and then also extended designs. This for example is titling. They also might do a bold or an italic. They produced optical sizes. Each G here represents a different design needed for a particular point size. And of course all of the above tasks also applied to other scripts beyond just Latin itself. So as you can see the work of these departments was really vital to the quality of the typefaces and of course to the sales of the machines themselves. Yet their contribution that of the type drawing, type design office have rarely been acknowledged. Most staff were never credited for their work. And you probably noticed many of the staff were women. So why now? Why take this research on now? Alice completed her PhD about five years ago. It helped her understand the role of the drawing offices and how important they were, particularly in the hot metal and phototype setting eras. Of course Alice is a woman. She is a type based designer. And so the fact that these offices were staffed by women was intriguing to her so she wanted to know more. This interest converged with Fiona's here in a rad jeans skirt, both as practitioner and researcher. She joined the line of type UK in 1978 and managed the department of typographic development there for over a decade. This included the type drawing office as well. So as you can see in this image, again the drawing staff was primarily women. There have been discussions in the recent past as to how women's visibility and type design can be enhanced. But it was really important for Fiona and Alice to show the extent to which women have been central to the type industry, not just now in the current digital era but throughout the last century. So with this project, the aim was to demonstrate that type design and just design in general often relies on some kind of collaborative process and has done so throughout history. They are not looking however to find female counterparts to the male heroes of type design. They want to show that women have played a significant role in the process. Well before it would have been really possible to ever sort of name these famous women type designers. So just to clarify, excuse me, we do not aim to state that these women who worked in the drawing offices were designers. And our project is really concerned with women in industry and for whom the designation type designer is for the most part a misnomer. So we are interested in the lived experiences of women working in the drawing offices. And we are seeking to produce an accurate account rather than a romanticized view of their contribution. And we essentially derive data from archival research, from interviews such as with these people here, from material history. And in doing so we've been identifying and documenting agencies of change for working women in these companies with reference to three interconnected contexts. The social context, the technological developments and their contribution to type design. Which our case studies intend to illuminate and you will lead on Alice's case study first. So this is what Alice is currently working on now. She's working on a case study related to Times New Roman. This is Alice at the start of her career. She worked as a in-house type designer at Monotype and she's been very interested in their archives in its drawing offices, which are in the monotype offices, which are south of London. She is currently researching the contribution of the drawing office to the making of Times. It was produced in the early 1930s and that period really can be considered sort of a golden age of Monotype. This is the era of Eric Gill, Bruce Rogers, Frederick Gowdy and of course Stanley Morrison. So throughout that period, the TDO or the type drawing office played a key role in the completion of major typefaces that are still considered classics, Times New Roman being one of those. There's always been a lot of speculation around the origin of times, I'm sure you're familiar, but this isn't the focus of the case study. We know that Stanley Morrison art directed the design and that Victor Lardin produced some of the original artwork. However, neither of them had the necessary skills to turn these drawings into a fully working typeface family. For this, they had to rely on the skill of the anonymous TDO drafts woman. At the time, TDO staff worked under the guidance of Frank Himmen-Pearpont, who was a monotypes charismatic works manager. The works was essentially monotypes factory. And Fritz Max Seltzer, he was a German who established the type drawing office. Under Seltzer's supervision, the TDO employed almost exclusively young women who were recruited from the local grammar school and often through the newspaper, as you can see in this ad. This meant that their hires were typically between 16 and 18 years of age. I'm sure you can guess why they hired young women and not young minds simply because they were cheaper to hire. Turnover was quite high in the department because the young women would join the corporation and then once they would leave, once they got married and started to raise a family. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the TDO staff was about 12 to 18 people who were, again, almost exclusively women. Some of them did pursue long careers at the corporation and they were even appointed to managerial roles. This, for example, is Dora Pritchett. She joined in 1908 and spent 30 years with Monotype, which is incredible. I have to correct an Americanism. They were only supervisory roles. They want managers, which is different in the UK. Yeah, supervisory was hard for me to say. Oh, sorry. I thought it translated. I was. Sorry if you don't know. This is Dora Lange. She joined in 1922. She was 16 and she stayed with Monotype for 45 years. Lange is of particular interest in this project. She left behind work diaries that provided highly valuable insights into the daily lives of the TDO members at the time Times New Room was being produced. By the 30s, the TDO had developed very precise working methods. In all likelihood, Stanley Morrison supplied the TDO with Lardon's drawings, which were used as a basis to produce those 10-inch or master drawings. Here's one of them, a 10-inch drawing. They had to take into account a number of constraints because of the Monotype system and just the physical consequences of engraving punches and striking matrices. Lange couldn't have possibly anticipated every one of these constraints when drafting the letters for Times. This is where, again, he would have relied on the expertise of the TDO to carry the design from basically sketch to production. These are trial proofs. Number one, trial proofs of Times, number one at the top and number 12 at the bottom. These were produced in 1931 between April and October. So this was the initial version of Times, and it was the nine-point cut. These proofs show the extent to which the TDO actually amended the original artwork to turn it into a fully-working text face. Take one very small example. If you look at the T in the first proof, you'll see it got narrowed in the number 12. One of the things that is very fortunate is that the women had to sign these 10-inch drawings, so we actually know who they were. You can see there's Dora Lang, Dora Pritchard is in here, and then right in the center bottom is Dora Newman. When Robin Nicholas started at Monotype, the Monotype Drawing Office in 1965, he sat next to Dorothy, and he would get help from Dorothy when he needed it. So not only did the women influence the type through their work, but they also influenced their male colleagues by informally training them as well. After the nine-point version of Times was completed, other type sizes had to be made. As well as other variants, Titling, for example, extended Titling, Fiona and Alice, though, were unable to find any other original drawings. As far as they know, written instructions for Morrison reached the TDO and had to be turned into actual type drawings. From their research, Fiona and Alice believe that working as a drawing clerk required both artistic flair and strong drawing skills. According to former staff, it involved a considerable creative element and required being good at math, nine-mount, as well as being meticulous. From that, it's assumed that the nature of the TDO's contribution went beyond a purely technical one, and Fiona, this slide is absolutely fascinating. We decided we would fail. Yes, we decided we would not pass this test. In fact, members of the drawing office, like Patricia Saunders, pictured here, had some opportunities to evolve in their role. By the late 1970s and 1980s, people who started at the TDO as drawing clerks were able to create new type designs in-house. This is Patricia's typeface Columbus. OK, so the period of the 1970s to 1980s relates to the case study that I'm undertaking, namely that of the Lana type Devanagri digital fonts. And Devanagri, some of you will know this here very clearly, is a script used in South Asia, particularly in India for writing Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, as well as other languages. And this map shows some of the Indian scripts employed by millions of readers, hundreds of millions of readers, with Devanagri being used by the greatest number. Now, Lana type Devanagri has interesting origin, and the name really refers to two specific designs, one having two distinct iterations. So if we look back to the 1930s, we find the original hot metal Devanagri fonts for the Lana type machine. And this machine was preferred over the monotype for newspaper setting. And therefore these fonts, Lana type Devanagri fonts, saw considerable use. But the Lana type hot metal designs for Indian scripts in particular were unsatisfactory, largely due to the limitations of the Lana type machine, which could not curn nor have an extensive character set customary for Devanagri. And these Devanagri fonts were poorer in design terms than monotypes, which were also considered less pleasing than earlier foundry types, such as those produced by this gentleman seen here, Javdi Dadaji, who founded the renowned Nenaya Sagar Press. And it was these specimens of the Nenaya Sagar Press that formed the starting point for the design of a new Lana type Devanagri typeface by Matthew Carter, commissioned by Walter Tracy for Lana type VIP film setter machine in the 1970s. And the resulting design showed huge improvements over hot metal. Yet some character combinations appeared disjointed, as encircled in red here, and the accent placement routine provided a few problems seen here in green, where the accent should be attached to the central vertical stroke. And there were character set restrictions, hence the disjointed characters, as there was still a one-to-one correspondence between a font cell and a keyboard code. Now this development, however, laid down the foundation for the digital version, also called, confusingly Lana type Devanagri, undertaken by me and my team at Lana type in consultation with Matthew. And I should perhaps say here that my background was in languages, including Sanskrit, and I joined Lana type initially as a research assistant, and research was instrumental in taking the design forward, and in fact underpinned all the designs that we took on in the Lana type drawing office in the 1980s. Walter Tracy, who you see here, he worked as manager of typeface development at Lana type from 1948 for some 30 years, and he had retired by the 80s, and was an occasional consultant and external designer. And when I reluctantly took on the running of the TDO, I had university graduates rather than teenagers, and Walter told me that it would lead to trouble as they would only question me, and I replied that it was precisely what I needed. The majority of the artwork for the redesign of the Devanagri was done by George E. Suerman, shown at the bottom here. Who was to become the head of the type drawing studio in the 1980s, and Alice will be interviewing her during the next phase of our project. Now, although by then, we only undertook non-Latin designs, it's a horrible umbrella term, but you can understand why I use it, because actually what it covered was Arabic, South Asian, Thai, and Ethiopic. The test for applying to join the TDO was to draw freehand a copy of this Times Europa S, designed by Walter Tracy. And the interviews for the TDO were perhaps somewhat less orthodox for that period. So when interviewing women, they were not asked whether they planned to have a family, they were interviewed for their artistic skills, their enthusiasm for the subject, their willingness to undertake experimentation, and to give painstaking attention to detail. And revisions to the line of type Devanagri designs were points of reflection and discussion, rather than merely instructions handed down to the letter drawers, as had been the case in Walter's days. And our projects benefited greatly from information supplied by colleagues in the Middle East, India, and Pakistan, who were in constant contact with the end users, and also line of type I ran weekly seminars on Indian orthography. Programmers also contributed to the design process, and at line of type we invented the phonetic keyboard for Indian scripts that through software innovative composing systems enabled contextual forms, precise kerning, and accent placement, and lifted restrictions on the character set. Fully conjoined characters could be designed whilst reshaping of forms could be undertaken. Look at the internal count of the character on the left, and its new shaping in the second half of the character on the right. So in other words, we could exploit the latest technology in developing this typeface design without worrying about compatibility with the original version. The drive was to achieve optimum readability. A number of characters were revised, about 200 added in each weight, and again for post script fonts, the design was reviewed and refined in the drawing office, where necessary. So this list shows one way to the first digital South Asian fonts created during the 1980s at line of type UK by the team you saw under my watch. And their development was the result of international collaboration in which the women in the drawing office played a key role, and their work contributed to the reading experience of millions of readers as during the last two decades of the 20th century, with these fonts, line of type had 90% of the Indian vernacular newspaper market, and they are still being used today, albeit in cloned form. I'm going to be about half a minute over time. Our view, I just want to conclude by saying, our view with this project is to acknowledge collaborative work we believe it's time to acknowledge the deeply collaborative nature of typeface design, at least throughout the 20th century, and to reevaluate some of the established narratives of type history to credit all of its contributors. Timing is critical, as unfortunately in the course of our research already two of the women we interviewed passed away, and many women are also very difficult to track, or they simply do not see the point in being interviewed as they don't see their own value of their contribution to type history. So we invite you to visit our website to see how the project progresses. I would like to thank you very much and Nicole and Erin and all the people here and the people listed here, but I have one last slide that I really want to show you. So thank you.