john philip sage (he/they) is an artist, designer, researcher, and educator that operates in hybrid modes of cooperation. Their research looks at the relationship between publishing, performance, typography, and language, often through publications, workshop methodologies, type design and spatial interventions. Their research continues to expand on the notions of publishing and performance as modes of activating, sharing, and distributing content with other bodies, understanding that every design gesture carries an act of re-interpretation. They are interested in exploring how language gets materialised through typography, and the material effect that language has in bodies. Grounded in a commitment to critical forms of design dissemination, their approach embraces collective, distributed, and situated forms of knowledge production. They have been a lecturer at Kingston University and Camberwell College of Arts, and they are currently an associate member at STORE Projects. They have also participated in art residencies at Fabra i Coats (Barcelona) and Balmaceda Arte Joven (Santiago de Chile).

What does it mean to choreograph a text? Approaching the Movement Research Performance Journal as a space for rehearsal, Carlos Romo-Melgar and I proposed a redesign that treats reading itself as a choreographic experience. Paratexts [titles, footnotes, images, margins, page numbers, citations, etc] become devices that guide the reader through temporal and spatial sequences, shaping how meaning emerges. Each issue activates paratext differently, responding to its theme, so that reading is never fixed but always relational and improvisational.

In this workshop, developed with Carlos Romo-Melgar for the Movement Research Performance Journal, we explore intersections between movement and letterforms. We invited participants, many outside graphic design, to challenge typographic traditions by engaging with tools, gestures, and bodies rather than fixed rules. Typography often foregrounds the mark on paper while omitting the body that produces it. We propose a shift: using Laban Efforts as a framework to connect bodily movement with typographic gesture. Through shared prompts, participants generate traces, strokes, and graphic components that can later be analyzed for synchronicities and translated into type design.

DRAMA, developed in collaboration with Alessia Arcurti from 2021 to 2024, is a workshop methodology exploring how text can be activated and its reception affected, through voice, sound, movement, space, and collectivity. It investigates non-linear, personal, and performative approaches to the production and analysis of text. Central to DRAMA is the notion of ‘over-sharing’ as a tool for empathy, connection, and affirmation. This concept has intersected with domesticity, carnality, conviviality, sobremesa, listening practices, voice and sound, cybernetics, and lesbian erotica. These seassion have taken place at Apiary Studios, Chisenhale Dance Space, Kingston University, and the Estonian Academy of Arts, and some of them have been designing in collaboration with Eevee Zayas, Maria de la O Garrido, Carmen Gray and Giulia Astesani.

Taking Daniel Linehan’s untitled duet performance as a starting point, “um” is a medium-contrast narrow serif typeface that, despite drawing inspiration from movement, is designed in a subtly controlled manner. The abrupt unbracketed slab serifs position the typeface within the visual realm of numerical and non-gestural, even cybernetic, dance notations such as Labanotation and Beauchamp-Feuillet baroque dance notation. This makes the typeface appropriate for essay-like running text with a research-based, academic tone.

However, the systematic rhythm is disrupted by a series of OpenType features that allow the typeface to behave in more expressive, disruptive, and hesitant ways. These features evoke the strange rhythms of Daniel Linehan’s performance, making its alternate letters great for display and more playful purposes.

Somatic Publishing (2023) at Kingston School of Art, developed with Alessia Arcuri, is a five-week module focusing on the relationship between interpretative strategies, performance, and performativity, as well as publishing and embodied forms of knowledge production and dissemination. The act of design supports interpretation: design not only relates to the material form of an object, it also interacts with language by proposing forms of interpretation whose effects are both material and immaterial. Participants explore how publishing can make things public as a mode of interpreting, distributing, and sharing content across bodies and spaces, investigating textual, visual, and multimedia sources to challenge their role as designers.

BOARC Courier, desogned in collab with Carlos Romo-Melgar, is an open typeface that translates the ‘imprints’ found at BOARC and Bidston Hill into letterforms. Like other elements of the visual identity, it functions as an open protocol, allowing users to activate, re-evaluate and expand it as they see fit.

The initial version of the typeface sources its forms in archival documents, correspondence, letterheads, carvings on the hill’s surface, and a collection of symbols representative of Bidston Hill. The design of the letterforms is unified by a geometric structure that reflects the visual language prevalent in the archive’s data records, taking advantage of the legal status of Courier and its widespread availability across various devices.

Additionally, the typographic protocol includes a grid that enables users to contribute new glyphs to expand the typeface, encouraging change and distributing authority in the current visual language of BOARC.

The design of the 2019 degree shows focused in creating a supporting visual system helping to navigate a spatially complex and visually saturated venue such as the London College of Communication. The show proposes a journey through the college building divided into six acts. The different acts are interconnected with each other and don’t overlap with the existing signage of the building. In order to guide visitors throughout the venue, we used a wayfinding system that mainly took place on the floors. This system, is activated by a group of performers during the opening night, delivering practical information and provocative questions to the audience in their interactions. This way, the opening night becomes a choreographed event in which the different actors (the work, the public, the performers, the institution), interact and expand the experience of a degree show, which was live-streamed to social media platforms. Designed with Carlos Romo-Melgar.

From the walls onto the printed page: the body as a publisher (A typographic opera) is a workshop that explores the relationship between publishing, performance, language and typography. It investigates methods of text activation (including silent, polyphonic, abrupt and disrupted reading), choreographic writing (through gestures, actions and orientation), the materials of reading (such as paper, screens, props and walls) and the bodies that engage in it (their positions and conditions).

The project begins with a single text and gradually expands into other textual and visual sources, with a focus on intertextuality and the transmission of meaning across media.

Recognising the political dimension of publishing as a means of amplifying or marginalising voices, the project pays close attention to queer voices and their role in the production of knowledge. Participants collectively compile, edit and typeset a final outcome presented as a (typographic) opera, which is then activated through a final performance event.

The design notes are something we have developed at spreeeng (where our cooperative model values distributed authorship, shared credit, and equal pay, and avoids hierarchical structures such as the figure of employer or employee). A central value of spreeeng is the dissemination of knowledge generated through design. Design notes are negotiated spaces within projects where key decisions, methods, and research are made public. They function as a way to share the reasoning behind design choices, document experiments and processes, and make insights accessible, extending the impact of our work beyond individual projects and supporting collective learning.

As part of our advisory role for A Line Which Forms a Volume 6, Carlos Romo-Melgar and I led workshops during a residency at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, exploring experimental editorial and design practices.

The Quadrat Workshop supported the editorial and design team in translating abstract ecological thinking into editorial strategies. Working with the idea of the “afterlife of ideas,” participants observed and analysed material traces, biological processes and human and non-human actors within assigned quadrats. Each quadrat became a site for mapping, drawing and interpreting interactions, producing relational diagrams and typographic experiments that formed the conceptual and visual foundations of the publication.

Workshop for Incidental Writing approached writing as an embodied, spatial and editorial practice. Participants used chance-based methods, such as tracing pebble outlines, to delimit fragments of source texts, producing speculative writing that introduced rupture and unpredictability. Outcomes were compiled into a collective manifesto and displayed across Bidston Hill, foregrounding writing as a distributed, material and environmental practice.

Performing Paratexts invited participants to perform the roles of title, subtitle, body text or image. Using movement and spatial arrangement, the group explored how meaning emerges through proximity, sequence and emphasis, revealing power structures embedded in publishing. Influenced by Johanna Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing, the workshop positioned layout as performative, relational and critical rather than aiming for a final artefact.

Concrete Dreams explores Tyneside’s transformation during the 1960s and 1970s, inviting visitors to craft their own narratives as they move through the exhibition. In designing the 2D and 3D elements, we reimagined the presentation of brutalist architecture for contemporary audiences, moving away from the often solemn, static approaches typically used to showcase this era of infrastructural transformation. Objects are displayed as constellations, moving away from a linear narrative, while the continuous three-room installation intentionally strips walls of traditional labels and explanations, toning down the institutional voice to create space for visitors’ own reflections and memories. Interpretation content was sprayed on locally sourced concrete rubble, echoing the theme of ruins and providing a tactile contrast to the exhibition’s title. Typographically, we took a handmade approach to emphasise the transient visual language of the built environment. Graffiti served as both a functional and symbolic medium, referencing construction site markings while evoking the rawness of vandalised architecture. Together, these decisions challenge conventional, sterile methods of presenting brutalist architecture, creating an experience that feels immediate, personal, and immersive.

A core principal of spreeeng is the dissemination of knowledge generated through design, including occasional publications like Dispatches, which focus on snapshots of our practice, alongside an ongoing commitment to formal and informal design education. The Dispatches gather details and material traces from works developed at spreeeng.

The first issue included a welcome note introducing our cooperative, its inner politics, and current members. Featured material includes visual protocols from the Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre, such as a reproduction of the horse carving on Bidston Hill, derived from site-specific observational methods. The print text, I’m here for the building, the building is here for you, reflects BOARC’s ethos of research, communality, and experimentation.