Simon Johnston was educated at Bath Academy of Art and at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland. In the 1980s he co-founded the design studio 8vo in London, and was instigator and co-editor of the typography journal Octavo. Later he relocated to California, where his current design practice, Simon Johnston Design, focuses on publications for galleries and museums. He is a professor and Creative Director of the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography (HMCT) at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. In 2017 he launched the publishing house Verb Editions (.com). He is contributing a foreword to the forthcoming book, Octavo Redux. Your current practice encompasses design, teaching, publishing and art. Do you bring the same sensibility to each of these disciplines, or...

The second part of our conversation with Hamish Muir and Mark Holt.Unit Editions: You have often cited your dissatisfaction with the state of British graphic design in the late 80s. What was so bad about it, and in what way was Octavo a riposte to that state of affairs?  Hamish Muir and Mark Holt: As we said in our editorial for Octavo #1, British design was very parochial, full of in-jokes and cultural references that did not transfer well across European boundaries. There appeared to be a love affair with symmetry. A lot of design was cute, banal, or twee, and terribly British in a Dick van Dyke-like parody kind of way. Much of the typography around was simply in service...