SOTA Typography Award Honors Paul Shaw
The Society of Typographic Aficionados created the Typography Award in 2003 to acknowledge outstanding members of the type community and their creative achievements. Recipients of the award are invited to attend the current year’s TypeCon event, to be recognized and appreciated by their peers and fellow aficionados.
The Society of Typographic Aficionados is pleased to announce that designer and historian Paul Shaw has been honored with the 2019 SOTA Typography Award. The presentation took place on Saturday, August 31st, 2019, at the Hilton Minneapolis as a part of TypeCon2019.
Paul Shaw is a fixture of the typographic community — an authority on design history, a talented designer and calligrapher, and spirited educator. For over three decades, Shaw has researched and practiced the typographic arts: as a graphic designer, calligrapher, and letterer at his firm Paul Shaw Letter Design; as a contributing editor for Print; as an author of numerous articles for Eye, Baseline, Codex, Letter Arts Review, and Typography Papers; and books, including The Calligraphic Tradition in Blackletter Type and Helvetica and the New York City Subway System.
He has designed or co-designed 18 typefaces, among them Kolo, Donatello, Bermuda, Old Claude, and Stockholm. Since 1980, Shaw has taught at various New York-area universities and design schools, including the School of Visual Arts, Parsons, and Type@Cooper, and has led numerous lettering walks in cities across the world, as part of the Legacy of Letters. Paul is a long-time member and supporter of SOTA, and we are honored to recognize him with this award.
The SOTA Typography Award is presented each year to an outstanding member of the type community. Recipients of the award have included Hermann Zapf (2003), Ed Benguiat (2004), Matthew Carter (2005), Adrian Frutiger (2006), David Berlow (2007), Gerrit Noordzij (2008), Gerard Unger (2009), Doyald Young (2010), Erik Spiekermann (2011), Mike Parker (2012), Zuzana Licko (2013), Fiona Ross (2014), Robert Slimbach (2015), Fred Smeijers (2016), Paula Scher (2017), Louise Fili (2018), Carol Wahler (2018), and Paul Shaw (2019).