Rob Waller
After training as a typographer, Rob started his career as a researcher with the Open University in the 70s and 80s, working in a multidisciplinary environment that obliged him to argue for the role of information design in terms familiar to educational, language and media researchers. He founded the multidisciplinary Information Design Journal in 1979, and ran a series of related conferences.
After completing a doctorate on typography and discourse at the University of Reading in 1987, Rob started the consultancy Information Design Unit. Together with business partner David Lewis, he grew this into the UK's largest information design agency, selling to WPP in 2001, and subsequently leading the merged information design team as part of Enterprise IG, the global branding agency.
Rob has worked with numerous well-known service brands in the UK and Europe, including AXA, Barclays, Vodafone, Unilever, British Gas, T-Mobile, BT, Norwich Union, Tele Danmark, Telenor, Sanitas, BBVA and Eircom. He has also worked extensively on clear communications for the public sector and government.
Rob is particularly concerned with ways to make reading easier for people with poor functional literacy, and with the needs of organisations who have to make very complex information accessible to a wide audience. The Simplification Centre faces both of these audiences: consulting and co-creating with users, and articulating information design skills for organisations, and making them available through training.
Rob's research interests centre around the role of typography and layout in language: enabling writers to extend their means of expression from purely linear to graphically structured language; and supporting readers who engage with text in an active and purposeful way.
His earlier academic work developed a genre theory of typographic design, and he has lately been reinterpreting this using the pattern language approach developed by the architect Christopher Alexander. The goal is to articulate what skilled designers do, in order to make their strategies more accessible to anyone who needs to make information clear.
