Type@Cooper 2015 Lectures Made Available Online

POSTED ON: April 17, 2015

All 12 of the 2015 Herb Lubalin Lecture Series, organized by the Type@Cooper program since 2010, will be made available online thanks to a grant from Jonathan Hoefler, of Hoefler and Co. Type Foundry. The grant pays to professionally capture the lectures on video and make them available within days of their taking place. The first four lectures, including a conversation with Victor Moscoso A'57, the renowned psychedelic poster artist, hand letterer and underground cartoonist, can be now be viewed on the Type@Cooper Vimeo channel. The remaining lectures will take place during the summer and fall semesters.

Type@Cooper, a Continuing Education program run in conjunction with the Type Director's Club, offers a Postgraduate Certificate in Typeface Design. The Herb Lubalin Lecture Series, free and open to the public, covers all aspects of type including history of letterforms, the technology of printing, design, aesthetics and the font market.

"We were thrilled that Jonathan Hoefler generously offered to fund the capture of these fascinating talks," says Cara Di Edwardo, program director of Type@Cooper. "Presented in the Rose Auditorium, which seats only 200 people, these lectures often are 'sold-out' within weeks of being announced. People around the world have written to us asking that we make the lectures available online, and until now we didn't have the resources to do it."

The first lecture put online was a conversation with Victor Moscoso, who created some of the most famous rock concert posters of 1960s. Design historian Norman Hathaway talks with Moscoso about his methodologies, experiences and design sense in a program entitled, "Type Confusion and Color Aggression." The other videos include an examination of Midwestern gravestone typography, a deep-dive into the making of the Obsidian typeface and a look at the influence of Ernst Schneidler, a European letterform designer and educator of the early twentieth century. Each lecture lasts for an hour or more. 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.