Wednesday, August 24th
Thursday, August 25th
Friday, August 26th
Saturday, August 27th
Sunday, August 28th
This information is subject to change.
Wednesday, August 24th
9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Pre-conference Workshops
View the workshop schedule for details.
7:30 pm
Why We Design: Looking in from the Outside
Presented by Type Directors Club
Hosted by Amazon
View the special events schedule for details.
Thursday, August 25th
9:00 am – 4:30 pm
Pre-conference Workshops
View the workshop schedule for details.
9:00 am – 5:50 pm
Type & Design Education Forum
View the forum schedule for details.
11:00 am
Type Walk with Paul Shaw
View the special events schedule for details.
7:30 pm
Keynote Presentation
Presented by the Society of Typographic Aficionados
Hosted by Amazon
View the special events schedule for details.
Friday, August 26th
8:00 am
Continental Breakfast
Exhibits & SOTA Marketplace Open
8:30 am
Opening Remarks
State of the Union
8:50 am
Empty Space Characters In Modern Character Sets
There was, perhaps, a time when type designers could work under the assumption that their lovingly crafted letterforms would find their way next into the hands of graphic arts professionals: folks who would, with care and expertise, prepare those letterforms for final transfer onto a fixed medium — be it a card, a book, a flyer, or what-have-you.
But that notion — as comforting as it might be — is mostly myth these days. It’s a lot safer to assume your font’s going to be converted, crunched, expanded, compacted, and slapped around every which way by people with bad taste who know nothing about design.
But don’t worry! Once you know what to do, there’s absolutely no reason not to embrace this new reality. This presentation will introduce you to some simple and effective changes you can make to your fonts and do it as painlessly as possible, by examining characters that you don’t even need to draw and that cost you next to nothing to include in your font. It’s just whitespace!
9:30 am
Typewood: The Declaration of Deconstructed Typography
In January 2015 Novo Typo started the Typewood project. Typewood is a research project about designing, deconstructing and transforming multi-colored digital typefaces into wooden type for letterpress. Typewood jumps from digital to analogue techniques, from CMYK to RGB color modes, and from computer screen to letterpress. Typewood will show the future of multi-colored typography by re-inventing and deconstructing history. In January 2016, as an extension of the Typewood project, Novo Typo designs a new chromatic typeface which will be produced in lead for letterpress and will be available as chromatic font as OTF/WOFF file for computers.
Color will be the new Italic.
In 2016, the Typewood project received a Certificate of Typographic Excellence of the Type Directors Club, New York, USA and an Award of Excellence of Communication Arts magazine.
9:50 am
Never Use Futura
You thought you knew everything there is to know about Futura, but you’re wrong. Futura not only went to the Moon, and advertised for countless companies, it has been the face of German communism, British conservatism, and American politicians of all stripes. Futura became one of the most popular and iconic designs of the twentieth century in spite of a world-wide economic depression, trade embargoes, political boycotts, government prohibitions, and many knockoffs and competitors. *Never Use Futura* chronicles the cultural history witnessed (and recorded) by the typeface Futura from its avant-garde beginnings to its mid-century triumph and investigates its present-day nostalgic, critical, and forward-looking uses. Even now, Futura remains the iconic typeface of tomorrow. Countless designers have used the type to signal progress and promise change but also to critique capitalism and subvert authority. Futura has sold millions of people their dreams and hopes (and shoes and cars), and ever since the Apollo missions it has embodied our cosmic aspirations. The story of Futura is more than a story of geometric shapes and Paul Renner, it is the secret history of modern public life.
10:10 am
Coffee Break
10:40 am
Visual Translation: Typographic Study on Cross-cultural Branding
When an American brand attempts to expand its market overseas, it needs to translate the brand into the local language in order for it to be understood by the new market. It is often difficult, however, for graphic designers to find a typeface in the local language to match the look of their English brand identity. This difficulty is particularly significant in Asian and other countries that do not use the Roman alphabet. My research “Visual Translation” seeks to identify US brands that require more work on their overseas brand identities and to provide creative solutions for the problems.
In my presentation, I will provide: 1) case studies of successful and unsuccessful cross-cultural branding examples, such as Coca Cola and Subway; 2) a brief history of typeface design in difference languages; 3) a new type design methodology for non-Latin language based on existing Roman typefaces.
11:00 am
Typo9010
TYPO9010 unites an encyclopaedic collection of Czech digitised typefaces starting from 1990 to 2010. Designed specimen book that can also be read end to end as a series of linked historical essays by some of the leading figures of Czech typography. Text written by various designers including Veronika Burian (Type Together), František Štorm (Storm Type), Bas Jacobs (Underware) place the book in international context. Over 400 typefaces are displayed, many carefully reconstructed from source materials especially for this book, and illustrated with a wealth of archival materials: drawings, photographs, posters and magazines.
The presentation will show the five years long-going process of collection data and preparing book. It will also explain the specific and unique local conditions, where small country and close community of designers made book like this possible. Thanks to the comprehensive and complex concept we can also use the book as interesting overview of exiting years when computers were starting to replace phototypesetting and copying letters by hand.
11:25 am
Type Incommunicado
After the descending of an iron curtain by the Soviet Union’s policies, design and production of type in Eastern Bloc affiliated countries were inadvertently influenced by a dogmatic economical and cultural environment. Independent foundries steeped in tradition and once blossoming, became nationalized with strict adherence to five-year plans. But how did the East keep up with Western typographic fashions? Who was the most prominent type spy, and how did material shortages contribute to a generated typographic aesthetic confined incommunicado? This lecture recounts some findings of brief typographic fieldwork accomplished in former eastern Germany, and presents some resulting new type design.
12:05 pm
Hollywood Remakes: Type’s Relationship to Story
Book after book explain the effect of type on the experience of novels, but we pay relatively little attention to the media of today and tomorrow — film. Every day, movie-goers fill cinemas around the world to watch renditions of stories they’ve already seen. From Jurassic Park to Ghostbusters to Annie, Hollywood seems intent on recreating every good film in history. When they do, it’s not only the actors, props, scripts, and sets they replace — it’s often the type, too.
Through a brief analysis of greater than a dozen original/remake pairs, I will try to answer questions like: What does a change in title say about the remake’s plot? What do captions expose about the characters’ physical and psychological setting? And how does the in-film typography relate to the narrative?
12:25 pm
Lunch Break
2:00 pm
Neon Nights
Neon typography floats, unmoored, in the air. Brightest in blackest night, its glowing messages both draw us in and repel us. Looped, turned, knotted, illustrative, cartoonish: neon type can, and, indeed, has been, turned into any linguistic form, incorporating pictures, illustrations, and animations within them. What about neon captivates us? Why do we continue to gravitate towards it, even as its practical application has lapsed?
My presentation will touch on three distinct points of entry to these questions: 1) a brief history of neon in its applied forms; 2) the technical capabilities and drawbacks of it as a material; and 3) its current use in cultural production, both in fine art as well as in advertising. Illustrating this presentation will be a photographic essay of neon in the cityscape of Los Angeles as well as diagrammatic sketches and installation photos of artworks incorporating neon.
Through this talk, I hope to approach and question the enduring allure of neon in typographic practice, its distinct uses within that practice, and electrified tubes of gas bent into letterforms continue to delight, attract, and intrigue us.
2:40 pm
Out of Print: Lo-Fi in a High Tech City
Like the Dowager Countess of graphic design, letterpress printing cleaves to tradition yet holds surprises at every turn. In a city that’s experiencing a tech boom of epic proportions, how do you make letterpress printing resonate as something worth holding onto? Jenny Wilkson, the founder and director of the letterpress program at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts promises to entertain with the story of the little print shop that could. Hear tales of the legendary SVC Wayzgoose, relive the drama of the Steamroller Smackdown, and find out how SVC’s letterpress shop has stayed nimble and relevant in these changing times.
3:05 pm
Multi-vernacular: Designing a Typeface for Seattle
Can a city’s essence be boiled down into a single typeface? Contemporary examples range from experimental commissions (Twin Cities) to self-initiated projects (Chatype for Chattanooga) to reinvention campaigns undertaken by a city marketing department (the typeface for the Dutch city of Eindhoven). What elements from a physical place influence the visual style of these typefaces? What about their function influences their form? Can one typeface speak for a city or does it instead speak for a moment in time?
Last year the City of Seattle decided to launch its own typeface project to unify the visual language of internal documents and for use on the city’s official website. “Multi-vernacular” is a conversation between Schema Design (Christian Marc Schmidt, Jayme Yen) and Village (Tracy Jenkins, Chester Jenkins) and the process around developing this typeface for the City of Seattle. Schema and Village will discuss the research and development of a resulting type program for Seattle that balances the need for a unifying system with the desire to include difference and variation.
3:25 pm
Michael Stinson & Rachel Elnar
The Math of Typography
We all recognize good design, but how can we execute it? People tend to think designers have to have a natural talent for typesetting, but Michael Stinson and Rachel Elnar believe the answer is in the numbers. Michael and Rachel will describe and demonstrate their core approach in digital typesetting to ensure optimal reading, all done with simple mathematics.
Many of these methods are derived from processes handed down in the phototypesetting years, and the rest is what Michael has formulated on his own while translating the mechanical process to digital (that and refining his process over designing 75+ annual reports during his 20-year design career). It’s what we teach students at TypeEd.
3:45 pm
Coffee Break
4:10 pm
Typographic Connections to Square Kufic
Square Kufic calligraphy is one of the simplest styles of Arabic calligraphy. Developed in the 12th century and reached its highest level of popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries, it covered the façades of entire buildings such as mosques and palaces during the Timrid dynasty in Samakand and other cities of Central Asia. This unique style of Arabic calligraphy is enjoying renewed interest due to its clean, minimalist forms and the geometric beauty.
After a brief overview of the history of Square Kufic and the principles of the script, I will present some of its most attractive traditional motifs and the script’s use in medieval manuscripts. I will then review a little known phenomenon where Square Kufic is composed using fleurons and other typographic ornaments, that originated in Europe, to produce ornate title pages for printed books published in Cairo between 1880 and 1950.
The last part of the presentation will include examples of Square Kufic typefaces and a number of book covers with Square Kufic designs.
4:50 pm
Building Community
A sense of place and belonging is critical to personal and professional development. But many of us feel excluded or isolated in our practice. It can feel overwhelming how to tackle this issue. TypeThursday organizer, Thomas Jockin, shares insights from growing what was a casual 3 person hangout to a cultural institution for typeface designers and users.
5:10 pm
SOTA Catalyst Award Presentation
The Society of Typographic Aficionados will bestow Roxane Gataud with the 2016 SOTA Catalyst Award, followed by her presentation.
6:00 pm
The SOTA Spacebar
Sponsored by Adobe Typekit
View the special events schedule for details.
Saturday, August 27th
8:00 am
Continental Breakfast
Exhibits & SOTA Marketplace Open
8:30 am
Opening Remarks
8:35 am
The Monograph Mullet
The scholarly monograph is the cornerstone of academic book publishing. A century of guaranteed sales and subsidies lulled university presses into a a sense of complacency that has been completely upended in recent years. Marketing strategies have become more central to a scholarly book’s success than at any time in the past. Book designers are now faced with the conflict of designing clever, attention-grabbing covers for dry, esoteric subject matter. Classic and clear typography is still all business on the inside, while there’s a fun new party happening on the outside. I will be discussing my own experiences with this identity crisis while sharing a variety of examples.
8:55 am
Before Desktop Publishing: The Democratization of Typesetting Methods Before the Desktop Computer
In the photosetting days of the 60s 70s, and early 80s, getting type set was quite the expense. You were paying for the skills of a typesetter, as well as the materials used to print out galleys, not to mention the overhead for running a type shop! What was a small business with regular advertising needs and little budget to do? Or what about underground publications of social movements like The Black Panther newspaper, or the Whole Earth Catalog running on a shoestring? Before the so-called digital revolution of Desktop Publishing, a smaller — albeit important — democratization of design production had already occurred with a selection of affordable, commercial quality in-house typesetting methods. This talk will explore a selection of cold typesetting methods that were used by small businesses and organizations to get their messages out, despite having little-to-no budget.
9:15 am
John D. Berry, Norman Hathaway, Olav Martin Kvern & Wendy Moss Thomas
Panel: Seattle in the Phototypesetting Age
Working as a phototypesetter in a small printshop in Seattle in the late 1970s, I unknowingly had my finger on the pulse of Seattle’s most interesting cultural life. Keying in the texts for most of the city’s left-wing and counter-cultural publications, including the alternative weekly Seattle Sun and the music monthly The Rocket, the Seattle Gay News, the Pacific Northwest Review of Books, and most of the local political brochures, ads, and flyers for both the Democratic party and more radical movements, I found myself at the nexus of more cross-currents than I could keep straight.
I’ve already spoken, at the Portland TypeCon, about the career of Chris Stern, who went from phototypesetter to experimental letterpress printer and publisher. This year I’d like to trace some of the many threads that began in that era when type was keyed in by hand and output on photo paper then pasted up for offset printing. Both the technology of phototypesetting and the culture of publishing at that time set the stage for Seattle’s future typographic prominence.
9:55 am
Coffee Break
10:25 am
When Words Matter: Writing About Type
What do you need to emphasize when you’re writing about a typeface? How do you avoid platitudes, but still establish a broad appeal? Who’s reading this stuff, anyway? Typeface marketing has come a long way from the days when it was sold alongside brass rules in hardcover catalogs. It must have been nice not to worry about fitting sales pitches into 140 characters, or fighting for attention in a Facebook news feed — but, here we are. And in truth, there’s good reason to be excited about being here.
If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that good writing sticks in people’s minds, no matter the medium. And with the right message, you might accomplish even more than publicity; you just might inspire more people to make typography a part of their lives.
Sally Kerrigan is the content editor at Adobe Typekit, and in this talk she’ll share with you what she’s found makes for the most effective writing about typography — and some common pitfalls you can avoid.
10:45 am
TTFAutohint: Making Hinting Fast, Easy, and Global
Hinting TrueType fonts can be a slow and expensive process, especially for multiscript projects with 1,000s of glyphs, but it is required by Windows. Sadly, many TTFs completely lack hinting after a simple conversion from OTF. TTFAutohint provides reasonable quality hinting in an instant, and sets a foundation for hand adjusting for ultimate hinting quality.
In 2010 Dave Crossland suggested to Werner Lemberg, the primary developer of FreeType, the idea of extending FreeType’s rendering system into a TTF autohinter, so that all fonts could look good on Windows.
Werner made a prototype that had promising results, and he since raised over $100,000 from individual professional type designers and with support from Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Extensis WebInk (RIP), FontLab, RoboFont and Glyphs.
In this session you will see the quality of hinting that TTFAutohint can produce for various scripts, learn tips on using it with your favorite font editor, and hear about the project’s future.
11:10 am
Ashley John Pigford & Tricia Treacy
The Phonografik Collectivo
Organized by Ashley John Pigford, Tricia Treacy and Roman Wilhelm, the intention of this project is the creation and exchange of original, experimental, typographic/hand-lettered/calligraphic artworks as translations of our languages’ common phonemes, derived from the Phoenician alphabet. Treacy, Pigford and Wilhelm approached 19 international participants to receive an assigned Phoenician glyph and paper, in exchange for the production of an edition of original artworks. Each participant translated the assigned glyph not only through their personal style, but through their unique knowledge and history of their written language, (i.e. hebrew, arabic and english). This collection of original artworks expresses our languages’ common ancestral core, bridging cultures and unifying global creative expression through typographic experimentation.
11:50 am
Creating a Better Reading Experience
The ability to make and control fire, and the invention of the wheel are undoubtedly key milestones in the history of humans. But no invention has been as important to the cultural advancement of humanity as that of writing and reading, emerging around 5,000 years ago. The ability to read and write reshaped our brains, and allowed us to record and accurately recall. Today many people around the globe read daily on screens, on mobile devices, tablets, and laptop and desktop screens. Although print is by no means dead, type designers now have to consider the ramifications of unknown output devices on their designs; publishers of content need to start thinking about typography in general to maintain a reading experience that meets expectations of 500 years of publishing tradition. Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag will discuss the design thinking, technology challenges, and testing that is required to create typefaces and typography for a successful reading experience across digital environments.
12:10 pm
Lunch Break
2:00 pm
A Journey to the Dark Side of Contrast
Verticals are generally heavier than horizontals — that is one of the fundamental conventions in Latin type design. But what if they aren’t? Over the past two centuries, designers have repeatedly challenged this rule, often focusing on the outrageous strangeness of letters made thick and thin in the ‘wrong’ places. But is ‘reversed contrast’ just a recurring (but ultimately useless) provocative trend — or can it unlock a neglected quadrant of design space that might also yield useful, perhaps even beautiful new solutions?
A look at where the idea of reversing traditional rules of stroke contrast came from, and how it’s been received; at what has been tried, and what hasn’t so much; at models (what exactly do we mean by ‘reversed’?) and mechanics (how does this work in the texture of text?); and at my own process of designing a serif text face with subtly reversed contrast, and the questions this particular design problem has prompted.
2:40 pm
Resident Alien Type
Can a typeface represent a persona in a context of narrative structure? How can a typeface visualize activist concepts? These are the questions we asked ourselves before our first collaborative project was born. Resident Alien/Alien Resident — the legal term for immigrants in the Untied States — is a project inspired by our lives as immigrant designers facing both challenges of design and immigration on a day to day basis.
We authored and designed a book on immigration incorporating a total of four custom Farsi and Latin typefaces to showcase the cultural, political, and social similarities and differences, while investigating the possibilities of making connotation stronger than denotation typographically. Our goal was to produce a piece where the interplay of both writing systems and their variations can reveal the underling significance of the subject matter rather than the syntax of the narrative. Our presentation will discuss the consequences of the designer as controller of meaning and examines the scope of the relationship between visual and verbal language within the contexts of content-driven type design.
3:00 pm
Re[visualizing] Sound
In the words of Robert Bringhurst: “writing is the solid form of language.” In addition to capturing the human language, designers and typographers also face the challenge of documenting other sounds, such as music and the language of animals. How do designers visually capture these other heard experiences in a meaningful way? In this presentation, I would explore various examples of codified systems that visually display sound with the use of typographic forms and symbols. One example is a design that I created for Oceans Initiative, where the visuals were created by playing a whale song into a cymatic visualizer — and while at first glance the poster appears to be abstract, in reality each form corresponds to a different musical note.
Throughout history humans have found many ways of visually documenting sound. While this is primarily done through the use of letterforms, many other visualizations are common. One example is the musical score, which is a very accurate portrayal of sound, as it takes into consideration the loudness, length, and tone of sound. And yet in the realm of design there is often there is a disconnect between the sounds we hear and the designs we see.
3:20 pm
Coffee Break
3:50 pm
Applied Color Label Soda Bottles: A Collection & Obsession
You know me as the person in the back of the room … but I’ve mustered up the gumption to submit to you a Type in 20 to cleanse your palette and share one of my collections (I have many). Before I began my 14 year journey as TypeCon’s AV Director, I was into type, letterforms, and design. So becoming a part of your conference was like dangling crack in front of an addict. I was an easy mark. I appreciate all things old. I have been into “vintage” before the term has become overused.
My love affair with Applied Color Label (ACL) soda bottles began in the late 1980s with a little monetary gift from my Grandmother, Adelaide. She told me to “buy some stock” and “blue chip stocks are always a good choice”. So I did. I bought some Pepsi stock. To commemorate this purchase, I spotted an ACL Pepsi bottle in an antique store … and that, my friends, was the beginning of this journey and obsession with these little gems. From West to East, North to South … thousands of towns across the US had a Soda brand. I’ll give you some history points of the applied color label process, and some other interesting tidbits…but mostly…I want you to sit back, allow me to geek out, and enjoy the pretty picture show.
4:10 pm
Typography in the Search for Perfect Language
The search for perfect language is almost as old as language itself. The notion of its perfectibility through deliberate action can be traced across many cultures and through many eras, although most attempts to achieve it have been as quixotic as they are visionary.
This talk will centre on a survey of the contribution of writing and typography to this endeavour. Working with an eclectic variety of historical projects which might be considered to occur at a level of design activity far deeper than that usually described as “experimental typography”, the talk will cover the many ways in which the form of text has been configured, at a fundamental level, to enhance expression in human communication while also adapting to technological changes.
It will proceed to outline more profound and ambitious interventions, ranging from orthographic and linguistic reform programmes to the field of asemic writing. Historically, language reformation has involved a wide variety of design strategies ranging from careful improvements to existing writing systems to their complete re-invention; radical new ways of conveying language in its solid, textual form that are also found in systems devised for preliterate societies. By contrast, asemic writing completely abandons the requirement for text to carry meaning or to represent anything but itself.
Predicated on the analysis of writing systems that are the product of conscious agency rather than cultural evolution, the talk will outline a provisional technical framework for the construction of text and will conclude with a number of speculative projects in the field by students from the MA Contemporary Typographic Media course at the London College of Communication.
4:50 pm
SOTA Typography Award Presentation
The Society of Typographic Aficionados will present the 2016 SOTA Typography Award to this year’s recipient.
8:30 pm
The Infamous Type Quiz & Silent Auction
Sponsored by Adobe Typekit
Hosted by Allan Haley
View the special events schedule for details.
Sunday, August 28th
8:00 am
Continental Breakfast
Exhibits & SOTA Marketplace Open
8:30 am
Opening Remarks
8:35 am
Nick Sherman & Frank Grießhammer
ITC Zapf Dingbats
Zapf Dingbats, Hermann Zapf’s popular collection of graphic symbols and ornaments, occupies a unique position in the history of modern typography and typographic technology. Zapf is well-known for designing classic typefaces like Optima, Zapfino, and Palatino, but his collection of dingbats is often overlooked as a quirky curiosity — something weird at the end of the font menu. Since their original release in 1978 and subsequent bundling with the first Apple LaserWriter printer, the Zapf Dingbats series has had a surprisingly strong influence on the world of typographic technology — enough for some of the symbols to be immortalized in Unicode’s universal standards for character encoding, even though their design language is so specific.
This joint presentation will explore the politics behind Zapf Dingbats’ ubiquity, their influence on other digital typefaces, their use for typographic symbols decades before emoji, plus a close look at many of the most interesting dingbats that have slipped through the cracks of time and technology.
9:15 am
Where Type Meets Unexpected Objects
Joseph Fry was an English type founder and is perhaps best known for his version of Baskerville, which ATF Baskerville was based on. He is primarily known as a typographer among us, he had other businesses which sometimes kept him busier than typography, including chocolate making. This presentation walks through the life of Joseph Fry and his influence on type and chocolate, followed by the presenter’s case of intersection between type and his new affection.
9:40 am
Designing N’ko Type and the Challenges of an Emerging Market
N’ko is a relatively new script which was invented in the 20th century to provide the Mande language group with an appropriate writing system. It’s currently serving over a million people in three extensive language communities in six West African countries and continues to expand as a vehicle of literacy and identity in post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa.
Beginning with a brief overview of the writing system, this presentation tells the story of how we came to design a respectful N’ko typeface and create an innovative type family, while attempting to take distribution and market-building into our own hands. While it’s still too early to judge the success of our strategies, what makes them unusual is our approach from a type designer’s position in an emerging marketplace.
10:05 am
Type on Track: Rio de Janeiro, Tramways & Carioca Letterform
This project researches the historiography of letterforms that have had a historical and cultural importance in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Considering the development of the city, the research turns to the network of tramways that ran there between 1868 and 1966 and which had a fundamental impact in the social and spacial configuration of Rio.
In this realm, the research turns to the destination roll signs of the tramways. These kept a cohesive style for over 60 years, even though they were hand painted, and presented a set of sophisticated typographic solutions to the problem of legibility in vehicles and of space occupation, by following legibility theories of the time and utilizing letterforms that were specially suited for horizontal expansion and compression.
The outcome of this research is the description and contextualization of a historic and culturally important model of lettering from Rio de Janeiro. Understanding this historic model may inform new type designs for a contexts of similar adverse legibility, as well as offering a new set of historic and ingenious solutions to the problem of width variation in a type family.
10:25 am
The Best of Clients at the Craziest Time: Hand-lettering & Font Design for the Trump Hotels
It began with creating a logotype for The Spa by Ivanka Trump. The lettering was so well received by Ivanka, their ad agency and others running the Trump hotel empire that Bell’s lettering quickly became the de facto style for their current advertising and branding: from hand-lettered headlines to a font to be used throughout the Trump hotels. Bell will share a few ideas (when should you use hand-lettering? when is it better to create and use a font? and how do you convince your client?), and will show and discuss her work in its development and application.
10:45 am
Coffee Break
11:05 am
Font Purchasing Habits Survey Results
Join me for the first public look at the results of the Font Purchasing Habits Survey. These results provide some answers to common questions about the effectiveness of discounts, licensing misuse, pricing strategy, the power of free fonts, typeface marketing strategies, and more. As a part of an International Business honors thesis, this extensive survey received over 550 responses from industry professionals who download and use type. Additionally, this talk will include other components of the thesis including financial information about the font industry as a whole, illegal font downloading and sharing, and lifespans of fonts. If you sell fonts, you won’t want to miss this.
11:25 am
To Protect and Defend: EULAs, Copyrights & Infringements
Font designers work tirelessly creating digital typographic masterpieces for buyers to enhance their design work. When they bring their typefaces to market, font foundries aren’t selling fonts at all but rather entering a mutual agreement with the buyer of these works.
From that moment forward, the font creator has no control over their creation and must look to establish its practices to protect its works. Via its EULA, filing software copyrights, regular policing of infringing font uses, the foundry must be prepared to defend itself in a court of law when it deems its agreement with the buyer has been violated.
With nearly 20 years of font licensing experience under his belt, Stuart Sandler has worked tirelessly to protect and defend not only his own library of 800+ typefaces, but many many more as the co-owner of font distributor Font Bros, the first font distribution company to have ever legally defended the rights of independent font designers.
Get a jump start on how to protect your fonts and pursue infringing font uses to preserve the integrity of your foundry and future font licenses.
11:50 am
Bestsellers
Could a typeface be designed as a bestseller on a purpose? The Bestsellers project presents a serious experiment realized as a semester assignment at the Studio of type design and typography at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. According to annual reviews of the biggest font distributors, analytical research and various questionnaires, students have selected top trending “best-selling” fonts and have tried to design the most significant typefaces. The final product is 12 typefaces made by 12 students. An integral part of this task was a cooperation with MyFonts, where all fonts are available for sale. In summer 2015 we summarized all results, sales numbers and financial incomes. We presented all these results of our “year-going” research at ATypI in Sao Paulo in October — great reactions from the audience confirmed that “up-to-dateness” and importance of this topic. We believe that US audience would be interest to see the results of our research as well.
12:10 pm
Doug Fast: Unsung Hero of Seattle Design
One of the key figures in Northwest design, Doug Fast has worked in Seattle for fifty years, quietly creating work for internationally known clients. Fast rejected his traditional design training to become a hippie sign painter, reinvigorating a flagging trade with his exuberant early 20th century sign and mural work. At the peak of his popularity he chucked it all in for a career designing trademarks and identities for clients such as K2, Starbucks, New Balance and Red Hook. Historian Norman Hathaway will interview Fast about his career and his working process.
12:30 pm
Closing Remarks
2:00 pm
Type Crit
The fifteenth iteration of the popular Type Crit, featuring analysis and elucidation by Matthew Carter, John Downer, and Akira Kobayashi.
View the special events schedule for details.
3:30 pm
Typographic Pub Crawl
Hosted by Andrea Leksen
View the special events schedule for details.
7:00 pm
Closing Event
Sponsored by AIGA Seattle
View the special events schedule for details.