Towards the end of last year Dr Catherine Dixon, Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, was invited by the British Council to take part in the 5th edition of BITS (Bangkok International Typographic Symposium), as yet the only typographic and type design conference in South East Asia. 

This was a great opportunity to share with a new audience some of her work engaging with typography as a form of social activism that she has been involved with both as a Visiting Professor working in Brazil and through research networks in the UK.

 It was also an opportunity to run a series of highly successful workshops. 

 First, a workshop with professional designers and creatives from across Thailand for BITS. Entitled ‘Working with words: language, structure, expression’ the aim of the workshop was to consider the expressive possibilities of working with the linguistic structure of a given text, each person working with selected lines from a Jenny Joseph poem, ‘The sun has burst the sky’. At the end of the workshop everyone’s lines were assembled so that collectively the group rendered the whole poem across the back wall of the studio. 

 The British Council then facilitated a workshop with a group of graphic design students at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts at the prestigious Chulalongkorn University, offering a wonderful opportunity for a highly productive information exchange between staff and students alike.