Jeffery was then one of the very few in Britain who designed in a modern, Tschichold-inspired idiom, importing type from Continental foundries (he was the sole user of Akzidenz in Britain, for example). Fior learnt more from the anarchist printer Desmond Jeffery, whose workshop was near his father’s office. Mainly improvising with large sizes of type inked up in colour on a proofing press, this was in no sense a professional education. With no formal training in art or design, Fior decided to learn about printing by joining the now legendary evening classes at the Central School run by Edward Wright in 1955 (see Eye no. Radical organisations and trade unions began to ask for his advice. The layout of Cab News, a journal for London taxi drivers, gave him the first chance to combine political and typographic activity. Through his association with various socialist groups, Fior drifted into the world of print. After Oxford, where he studied English but did little work, he joined the law firm of his father and, as he prepared for law exams, immersed himself in left-wing politics. Born in London in 1935, at school he developed an interest in calligraphy and learned to set metal type by hand (an experience that gave him a lasting aversion to Eric Gill’s Perpetua). Robin Fior’s design idioms are marked by his unusual route to graphic design. Since then, he has remained a significant figure in the Portuguese cultural community, both as a designer and as a critical presence. A year later, the Portuguese revolution made his expertise and critical intelligence suddenly in demand. Self-taught, he was uninhibited in his eclectic experiments. As a politically committed designer in London in the 1960s, Fior tried to find a graphic idiom that suited radical messages. Nor are his critical insights any less penetrating. His recent work is less obviously political than that of previous decades, but in its emphasis on language and structure it has lost none of his radical attitudes. Throughout his career, Robin Fior has maintained that design is a political activity.
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