The 2018 edition of the summer school once again took place in the Palacete Viscondes de Balsemão – a small palace in a beautiful square right in the city centre. This year we were joined by fifteen participants from around the world, ranging in age from 23 to 48 years, and each bringing their own insight and experience to the course.

Tutors Andrew Howard, Ronnie Fueglister and Hamish Muir gave lectures in the first week about approaches to editorial design, and about the professional journeys through which these approaches were developed.

As usual, part of the first week of the summer school is spent doing type and layout exercises – to get the juices flowing! These exercises are done using preprinted type sheets with limited type sizes and weights (one typeface) and grids. No compositions are done on computer but instead by cutting and pasting down. An ‘old-fashioned’ method, yes, but a surprisingly liberating and (re)informative process.

This year’s guest tutor, Russian-born, London-based designer Sonya Dyakova arrived on Sunday and gave her inspiring lecture on Monday.

In the second week attention was focused on the development of individual projects by the course participants. These were based on a shared assignment related to a series of short stories by the American author David Eggers. Whilst the assignment and its parameters was common to all, individual responses and interpretations varied according the individual reading and understanding of the participants. The interest was to see both how individuals drew meaning from the texts, and the ways in which they constructed graphic systems and codes to represent these interpretations. Examples of the outcomes can be seen below. We believe they are accomplished.