Set up in 1957, The Wynkyn de Worde Society meets eight times a year, and brings together people who work in publishing, printing, design, and associated trades. I gave a talk to the Society about my work on the Ministry of Stories and Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in 2013, and I’ve been a member since 2014. In 2015 I was the Honorary Designer for the Society (take a look at my Joy Division keepsake, Members’ Handbook and facsimile edition of a First World War newspaper, The Wipers Times, all designed that year). In 2017 I also designed this type specimen for De Worde, a typeface designed by Jeremy Tankard to commemorate the Society’s 60th year. I was Chair of the Society in 2023, and this year I’ve taken on the role of Honorary Designer again.

Wynkyn de Worde was one of the first printers to set up shop on Fleet Street in London, and he “worked at the sign of the sun” – the trade sign outside his print shop was a sun. His printer’s device (a block of illustration and text printed onto any publications he produced) also featured various designs of sun symbol.

You can read more about those on this post on the Society website.

Over the years, various Honorary Designers have created their own versions of the sun symbol for the Society. Here are just a few of those:

The one top left has been used as a sort of default over the years, and the one bottom right was one of the earliest used by the Society. Both are very close to the originals used in de Worde’s printing.

For my year, I decided to incorporate the name of the Society into the sun itself. I used a condensed sans serif typeface (Ellen Luff’s beautiful Sherman Display) to feel like rays of the sun, and used inverted commas and a bracket to create the face of the sun. Initially the inverted commas were both the same way up, but this year’s Chair, Peter Jones, pointed out that 2026 is the Society’s 69th anniversary, so I inverted one of them as a happy little nod to that.

The identity will gradually roll out across the items I produce during the year, with the Members’ Handbook and booking forms for events being the first pieces.

For the Society’s events, we also create keepsakes – printed items that celebrate the event. The first talk of the year, by Andrew Jones and Ned Campbell, was about their book London Clubs: Architecture | Interiors | Art – which documents the most beautiful, interesting and unusual private members’ clubs in London. The talk was during a luncheon at Stationers’ Hall (the longtime home of the Society), so I designed the menu for the lunch as if it were from a fictional Wynkyn de Worde Members’ Club, with a traditional looped belt logo, inspired by ones for a few other London clubs. On the reverse of the menu I wrote a set of rules that members needed reminding about after some supposed recent lapses. And as a little extra touch, I set the address of the fictional club as that of The Cockpit, the pub that members often head to after the luncheon.