Every year, the Walker Art Museum hosts Insights 2009, a lecture series on graphic design.

This year’s series starts March 10, and appears to be well worth attending. The theme this year is typography.

On March 10, the series kicks of with local type designer Process. Besides doing custom type for publications such as the New York Times Magazine, their fonts have been used for brand-identity purposes by the likes of NBC and Nokia phones.

On March 17 we’ll hear from David Reinfurt, a New York-based designer whose low-fi, avant-garde designs inform his work for O-R-G and Dexter Sinister. Like him or hate him, he’ll get you thinking about the purpose and meaning of design.

On March 24 it’s Experimental Jetset, a Dutch firm that has practically fetishized the use of Helvetica. They did the word balloons at the top of this post, but a better example of their simple-but-eye-grabbing work is shown below. You can read about the design here.

Poster designed by Experimental Jetset for Akademische Mitteilungen, a German magazine.

Finally, on March 31, comes Ellen Lupton, a Baltimore-based designer who, as director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art, curates exhibitions intended to introduce design to a broader audience. She teaches a course on “design writing”, intended to develop the skill with words that so often gets overlooked by our visually-oriented industry.

A series ticket costs $70 ($48 for Walker/AIGA members), or you can buy a ticket to an individual lecture for $20 ($15). If you’re a student you can buy individual tickets for $10, which ends up being cheaper than buying even a discounted series ticket. Click on one of the Walker links above for details.

I’m planning on attending at least two of the lectures, depending on my schedule. So if you’re going, drop me a line: we can meet up and say “hi” either before or after.