This website contains my research into the history of women in graphics in Britain. I'm Ruth Sykes, an educator, designer and researcher in the field of graphic design and illustration. I currently teach at the University of Hertfordshire and Central Saint Martins. I co-founded graphic design practice REG with Emily Wood in 2004.
My research into the history of women in graphics in Britain asks why history often overlooks the contribution of women to the field, the impact of this, and what to do about it. I hope that an increased awareness of how gender bias leads to historical undervaluation can contribute to the move towards gender equality in graphic design and illustration practice today. My research has been encouraged, supported and inspired by colleagues, students and the designers and illustrators who feature in the outputs. I am very grateful for this support and could achieve nothing without it. My research outcomes include book chapters, journal articles, exhibitions, public talks, university lectures and blog posts. For example:
2023: I guest lectured at the Visual Communication BA (Hons) course at Arts University Bournemouth to share my research for a forthcoming book chapter on Dorrit Dekk, and previous research on Norma Kitson’s Red Lion Setters. Although the two women created vastly different types of visual communication, there are some telling commonalities in their life experiences and approach to work.
2022: I gave a talk at the London Transport Museum’s ‘Art of the Poster’ event at the Acton depot, along with many design historian such as Lucinda Gosling, who spoke about John Hassall, and Oliver Green, who discussed transport and design in 1920s west London. In my talk, I looked at LT’s female poster designers, with a focus on two of the most prolific London Transport poster designers of all, Dora Batty and Herry Perry.
2021: I interviewed retired book cover designer Shirley Tucker about her career, which included designing the first cover for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar in 1960. I wrote a blog post for Eye magazine about Shirley’s work. Many thanks to Shirley and Michael Tucker for speaking to me, and to Faber Books for the cover images and details used to illustrate the post, and to Eye editor John Walters for the invitation to write the piece.
2020: I wrote an essay about Red Lion Setters for the forthcoming Princeton Architectural Press book Baseline Shift: Untold Stories of Women in Graphic Design History, edited by Briar Levit. Red Lion Setters have gone down in history as an all-female typesetting collective, although research revealed it wasn’t quite as simple as that.
2019: I gave the talk "London Transport's 'Golden Age' of Female Poster Designers" to Worthing Antiques, Arts and Collectors Club.
2018: the American Institute of Graphic Arts' journal 'Eye on Design' published an account of my collaboration with the Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection and students of the graphic communication design programme at CSM. Together we made an exhibition featuring work of current and past students called 'I Don't Know Her Name, But I Know Her Work' which ran from December 2017 to February 2018.
2017: I contributed an essay to the book that accompanied the London Transport Museum exhibition ‘Poster Girls’. This major exhibition featured over 100 London Transport posters designed by women, and ran until January 2019. In 2017 I was invited by the Design History Society to write a blog post for their website about my research.
2016: I curated the exhibition 'A+: 100 Years of Graphic Communication by Women at Central Saint Martins' which showed graphic design by women who studied or taught at Central Saint Martins from 1910 to 2016. There are short biographies of the designers who were in the show on this website, and I wrote an article about the exhibition for 'Typographic', the journal of the International Society of Typographic Designers.
My research continues, and I use it to inform my teaching and design practice.
I tweet about my interests @GraphicsUKwomen:
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