TEXT HEAVY

An exhibition of typefaces

Text Heavy: The Art of Type Design by Nick Shinn
Royal Canadian Academy of Arts
50 Sussex Drive, Ottawa
10 am – 4 pm, closed Sundays
November 14–28, 2025

I was inducted into the Academy in 2019, and now there’s a show of my work at its beautiful art gallery in Ottawa.

The Academy was founded in 1880 and has kept up to date in the 21st century by diversification, in terms of the identities of its members, of course, but also in the disciplines represented—with myself being the first type designer. But how to show typefaces in a gallery context? If I had my druthers, I would be satisfied with basic alphabet showings, like my specimen prints, but curators Robert Tombs and Henk van Assen had more expansive ideas, and they were quite right.

Six of the commissioned posters. The same brief produced widely divergent interpretations.

The format was suggested by the fact that this exhibition is the latest of a series in which RCA members collaborate with non-members, so forText Heavy, a dozen graphic designers from around the world were asked to create A2 size posters using their choice of Shinntype fonts, with the same brief and the same site-specific text—describing the show in which the posters appear, and also including a land acknowledgement. Some designers chose to feature “Text Heavy” as the main type, others evened out the emphasis, one made the land acknowledgment the main text, and another went so far as to research the original treaty document for where the gallery stands and reproduce it in full.

So, while some of the fonts they used dated from twenty or thirty years ago, and some were quite recent, these exhibits are fresh. The same is true for my contribution to the show, an installation of twelve hanging banners. These mirror the posters in number, and in reflexive quality, being in the classic vein of type specimens in which the text describes, or alludes to, the font in which it is set. However, to contrast with the dizzy variety of the posters, the banners are plain black on white, to a common flush left format.

Inspecting the minutiae of Phiz Particles One.

I wanted to see my glyphs at size, full of detail, especially Phiz Particles One, for which I presented the description provided by David Mouritsen of the method he used to code the effect.

Nick Shinn and Robert Tombs examine the typography of The Globe and Mail—several copies of which are delivered to the gallery every day.

As well as prints created specifically for the exhibition, there are examples of “fonts in use” in publishing and marketing. Newsprint editions of The Globe and Mail, which is set in Pratt Nova, Sense and Sensibility, are therefore on show daily. And, under glass, a variety of book and magazine covers.

Under glass: printed ephemera.

I made a reel combining three of my social media specimen videos (no talking heads), but that didn’t make it into the show.

Wearable type specimens, from the atelier of Karey Shinn.

The most exotic exhibit? That would be his-and-hers Scottish-themed garments: kilts and vests made from fabric plaid-patterned with alphabet and numeral specimens of the Scotch Modern fonts. This clothing was conceived, designed and tailored by Karey Shinn, while I provided the graphics for the fabric.

I never thought my work would appear in an art gallery. Although I studied Fine Art at college, I’ve pursued a career in advertising, graphic design and the font business, hardly white cube stuff—or so I thought. But the RCA has spread its wings, and the Arts (plural) to which its name refers have evolved from the original bailiwick of painting, sculpture and architecture to embrace a wide variety of disciplines.

All well and good, and isn’t that a worthwhile goal? —so that we emerge from the labyrinth, as Marcel Duchamp put it, of time and space, and escape the shackles of determinism. ●