Northfield School — Curriculum
Visual concept preview of the Education Course template's Curriculum page: The full syllabus: the six modules in order, the shape of a single lesson inside one of them, and what you need before Module one. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
Six modules across twenty-two weeks. Each one assumes the one before it, each one ends in something you made, and each one is critiqued twice before it closes.
The same six modules as the home page, written out. Titles and order never change between cohorts or terms — only the timetable does.
Letterforms and the hand
Weeks 1–3 · Two sessions a week at the bench. Anatomy, stroke order, and the broad-nib exercises that make the Latin lowercase make sense. You leave with a sheet of your own letters, critiqued twice, and a vocabulary for talking about shape.
Spacing, fitting, and the word
Weeks 4–7 · The module people call the hard one. Fitting, sidebearings, kerning by eye, and the difference between spacing a word and spacing a line. Assessed on one specimen line, reworked until it stops arguing with itself.
The text block
Weeks 8–11 · Measure, leading, alignment, and the grey value of a paragraph judged from across the room. You typeset the same four hundred words seven times and defend the version you keep.
Hierarchy and reading order
Weeks 12–14 · Establishing what is read first, second, and never — with size, weight, position, and space rather than colour. The brief is one dense page of information, set twice, for two different readers.
The grid, across many pages
Weeks 15–18 · Baseline grids, columns, modules, and the discipline of holding a structure across sixty pages and three collaborators. The brief is a short book, printed and sewn in the workshop.
Type on screens
Weeks 19–22 · Setting for a measure you do not control: fluid type scales, real device testing, and the small mercies of good defaults. The final critique is the whole term on the wall at once.
Every module runs the same four movements, twice a week for the evening cohort and once for the weekend one. The shape matters more than the topic: you watch someone competent make a decision, you make the same decision badly, and then the room tells you why.
Nothing here is a lecture. If a session has slides at all, it has fewer than five.
Ten minutes, by hand, before anything else — the same letter fifty times until the stem weight stops wandering. Nobody enjoys the first fortnight of this.
A tutor sets the same problem in front of you and talks through every decision, including the ones they reject. You keep the sheet they made while they were talking.
Ninety minutes on your own brief with two tutors moving between desks. Questions get answered at your desk rather than from the front of the room.
Work goes on the wall unsigned. The group reads it before anyone is allowed to defend it, and you leave with written notes for your folder.
A pencil, a steel ruler, and a scalpel. The school supplies paper, nibs, ink, and a flat surface; you bring the three things that should be yours.
Some experience setting type at work. A year of laying out documents, decks, or web pages is plenty. We do not teach software, and there is no software module.
Two clear evenings a week, or one clear Saturday, for twenty-two weeks. People who try to fit this around a deadline-heavy term usually defer, and we would much rather they defer early.
A tolerance for being told your work is not finished. Everything here is critiqued in a room with other people in it. That is the school, not a feature of it.
The order, the workload, and what happens when life intervenes.
The syllabus does not change between cohorts. All you are choosing is when you meet and how the critique reaches you.