The Typographic Hub is:

part of the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design at Birmingham City University; the Hub works to promote the history, theory and practice of typographic design

They organise an annual typographic symposium (16 March this year) and will be publishing a fair amount of typographically-related articles.

The website (built by Supercool) has had a fair amount of good attention from the likes of Hoefler+Frere-Jones (I’ve no idea who they are but 100,000+ followers on Twitter show’s they’re doing something right) and Gary Hustwit (who did the Helvetica and Objectified documentaries) among others.

Not My Type: An Out of Character Experiment is a typographical exploration of 26 letters (and a few sneaky characters) by 35 different Birmingham based illustrators, designers and artists, all displayed as one alphabet

There’s an interview with one of the curators, Charlotte Audrey Owen-Meehan, on This Is Happening. More info on CMYKern and a full list of participants (a veritable who’s who of Brum talent) on the Facebook group.

The exhibition will be in the CiB shop from 6 May.

The programme includes a fair amount of local talent (I’m no expert in this area but I recognise the names of David Osbaldestin, Smile, Ben Waddington and the Baskerville Project) with some international flavour added by Henrik Birkvig from the Danish School of Media & Journalism and John D Berry from Microsoft Typography in Seattle.

It’s £25 for most folks, £15 concessions. Here’s the full programme and you can register here.

Speaking of Smile, they went to visit Airside recently and written it all up on their blog. Well worth a read. This quote from Jamie Wieck stood out:

“We’re now a design company competing with advertising companies that have design and digital design subsidiaries. They know how to talk… some call it strategy, others might call it hot air, but either way we have to learn a bit of that now in order to compete.”

Nathan Monk, director of the Smile Creative Agency, is working on a new project called Font Lorry.

I intend to create an online distribution platform for emerging typographic talent. Whilst at first this may appear to be a font foundry, I believe I can make this into a viable structure for typographic goods of all natures.

I will turn Font Lorry into a reliable distribution channel for designers to get original content noticed by a global audience and increase future interest in their work.

I plan to catalogue typefaces, novelty items, icons, merchandise, desktop wallpapers, limited edition prints and typographic essays

He’s looking for launch content although, by the looks of the Font Lorry Twitter account, this is starting to come together nicely.  If you want to get involved then contact details are on the Font Lorry website.