Ted Staunton

Ted Staunton is the designer of all the fonts in The Sherwood Type Collection. Ted Staunton’s life with letters began with a five-year apprenticeship as a hand compositor (picking up individual lead letters from type cases and assembling them ready for the letterpress machine, in the same manner that Gutenberg had developed 500 years earlier). After finishing his apprenticeship, he took a three-year full-time course in typographic design at Leicester College of Art. The first of his complete alphabets was designed at this time, the mid-1960s. In later years, as a private press operator and type designer, he engraved his type designs on metal. After copper matrices had been made from these masters, lead type could be cast for hand typesetting. In another development, home-made transfer lettering sheets allowed him to use his fonts in artwork being prepared for printing. The computer, which he was initially reluctant to embrace, opened new horizons and freedoms. A type-design program allowed him to transfer all his designs to a digital format and create fonts which could be used at will. His experience with letters has thus reached from the medieval era, as a printer engraving and casting his own type, to the electronic age. In 1970 he emigrated to Canada, and lives in a suburb of Vancouver, on British Columbia’s superbly scenic west coast, with his wife and family.