Type Tourist, City Signs with David Quay

Type Tourist explores the rich heritage of urban and vernacular signs and lettering in our cities and towns.

David studied graphic communication at Ravensbourne College of Art & Design from 1963–67. For the next seven years, he worked in various leading London design companies as a packaging and graphic designer. He started his own company, David Quay Design, in 1987 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.

Since late 1987 he worked in partnership with Freda Sack (1954—1919) on a broad range of type projects. 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 licence 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.

David lectures internationally in typography and type design. He has had a long association with the London College of Printing (now LCC) and was a visiting lecturer at the Danmarks Designskole Copenhagen. Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. For three years, he was a professor of typography and book design at the Fachhochschule Mainz. In 2000 this prompted a move from London to Wiesbaden. Based in Amsterdam from 2001, he taught typography and design at Akademie voor Kunst en Vormgeving St Joost /Avans Hogeschool Breda. In 2008—13 he taught typography at IDEP in Barcelona 2 months a year. He continued to work closely with Freda Sack and Foundry Types in London to expand The Foundry typeface library.

David was one of the founder members 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. During this period, they ran a popular lecture series inviting leading international speakers to London. The Dutch lectures led to David’s connection with Amsterdam, and The Foundry’s collaboration with Wim Crouwel on the Architype Crouwel Collection and Foundry Gridnik.

Stuart de Rozario, who was the senior type designer at The Foundry, has now become a Quays partner in The Foundry Types.