Lucy Hitchcock

I am a book designer, a mother (of teen aged girls which is insane btw), a professor, and a department head. I teach typography, Design Studio for undergrads, and Visual Narrative for grads. I think about how we read spaces and how we write form. I am enamoured of three dimensional typographic, narrative, and poetic environments and experiences, and am fond of letters in all their permutations. I think about mapping as a kind of narrative form and reading “maps” as an essential skill for all visual and thinking people. I am interested in typologies and topographies… I came to GD through the side door nearly 25 years ago: as a student of literature and as a book editor and publisher, and found my way to form, and typography, and design — gradually. I’ve been teaching at RISD for nearly two decades now and am starting a one year sabbatical. Phew. I enjoy being in my fifties and exploring the peace that comes with experience, growth, evolution, being ok with not knowing, but also knowing. Everything will be ok. Except when its not. I long for a week surrounded by engaged minds, to write, to rewrite, to think, to figure out in granular terms what matters to me right now. The list that swirls around my brain in the wee hours looks something like this: language as form; language as pattern; language as resistance; language as politics and power; language as limit and structure and detail; language as too much and too easy and too ubiquitous. Language as shape and line and map; writing as shape and shape as form. Language as making. Language and silence.