Type Tourist explores the rich heritage of urban and vernacular signs and lettering in our cities and towns. This free Herb Lubalin Lecture by David Quay will be held online. Registration is required here.

David Quay studied graphic communication at Ravensbourne College of Art & Design from 1963–67. For the next seven years, he worked in a variety of London design companies as a packaging and graphic designer. In 1987, he started his own company, David Quay Design, to concentrate on graphic and typographic design. He also began to design his first text typefaces, subsequently released by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), New York, and H Berthold AG, Germany. 

His working partnership with Freda Sack (1954—2019) on a broad range of type projects began that year as well. The natural progression for their collective skills and experience was setting up an independent type foundry, and in 1989 they co-founded The Foundry, to design, manufacture, and license their exclusive typefaces. It was the first digital type foundry in the UK. Their commissions have included bespoke typefaces, marks, and logotypes – a directory typeface to be readable at very small sizes for Yellow Pages (awarded a D&AD Silver); corporate fonts for BG plc (British Gas) and NatWest bank, as well as signage typefaces for the UK railway infrastructure and the Lisbon Metro system, Portugal. 

Quay lectures internationally in typography and type design. He has had a long association with the London College of Printing (now LCC). He has served as faculty at multiple schools including the Danmarks Designskole Copenhagen and Fachhochschule Mainz. He also a founding member of Letter Exchange and its chairman for many years. He was elected a fellow of the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) in 1992 and was joint chair of the society with Freda Sack from 1994–9.