Over at 185 this week, the students of Graphic Design: Typography with David Reinfurt pinned paper to the wall to share their innovative designs using words and images. The class has been reading essays by Beatrice Warde (1900-1969), Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), and Paul Elliman, which provide “the raw material for hot metal typesetting in the letterpress print shop, photo-typesetting in the mechanical paste-up studio, and state of the art typesetting and design software in the digital computer lab.” They practiced design not only from their own imagination but in the spirit of historical masters.

As an additional exercise this year, each of the students designed a class stone for Nassau Hall. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S39/63/00K80/#comp000052ff592200000035935c56

What a treat it was to see all the provocative and strong pages to come from the class.

Since 2010, David Reinfurt has been teaching elements of graphic design to Princeton students, opening the type shop to them for the first time in many years as well as a state of the art digital studio. In addition to his teaching, in 2012 Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey and Angie Keefer set up a 501c3 corporation called The Serving Library, a cooperatively-built archive that assembles itself by publishing. It consists of 1. an ambitious public website; 2. a small physical library space; 3. a publishing program which runs through #1 and #2. http://www.servinglibrary.org/