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ProgramNew! TypeCon On Your Mobile DeviceGo to m.typecon.com and connect up your Twitter account. Once you’re signed in, browse the daily schedule, “star” the sessions you’re interested in attending, and then view or subscribe to your personal schedule. View or subscribe to the full TypeCon schedule. About the TypeCon2010 ProgramType makes a big splash when TypeCon2010: Babel takes over the City of the Angels. The Society of Typographic Aficionados presents its annual letterfest, featuring more than 100 of the brightest names in type and design, including: Akira Kobayashi, Doyald Young, Jill Bell, Teri Kahan, Andrew Byrom, Sean Adams, Richard Kegler, Kevin Larson, Jean François Porchez, Hank Richardson, Matthew Carter, John Downer, Gerald Lange, Chaz Bojorquez, Ricardo Martins, Johanna Drucker, Kris Sowersby, Denise Gonzales Crisp, Shelley Gruendler, Miguel Sousa, Adam Twardoch, Satya Rajpurohit, Adrian Wilson, Roger Black, and many more. TypeCon2010 explores the hot button topic of web fonts; an eye-popping look at antique type and lettering of the textile trade; the typography and lettering of Disneyland, a documentary film on the life and work of beloved type designer/letterpress printer/book artist Jim Rimmer; an exploration of the potential for a graduate program in type design in the US, and much more. Special events include the fifth annual Type & Design Education Forum and an international exhibition of type and design. Dozens of workshops, presentations, panel discussions, networking events, tours, and social gatherings will form a typographic adventure that will inspire you for years to come! Tuesday, August 17thSpecial Event: What the Font is WOFF?7:30 pm – 11:00 pm Wednesday, August 18thOptional Workshops9:00 am – 5:30 pm CSS3 Fonts Module Briefing2:00 pm The session will begin with a 45 minute presentation on the CSS3 Font Module, covering CSS3 Font specification overview, basic font properties (family name, style matching, size), @font-face mechanism, layout feature support, testing and conformance, font security issues and ideas beyond CSS3 Fonts. Following this, there will be open discussion on these and related topics. If you already have a question you would like to ask or a topic you want to discuss, you can post it here so that John will have some idea what to expect. Also, possible CSS mechanisms for ppem-specific outline selection will also be discussed. Special Event: Type That Moves (You)7:00 pm – 10:00 pm Thursday, August 19thOptional Workshops9:00 am – 5:30 pm Type & Design Education Forum9:00 am – 5:30 pm Tour: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library10:00 am & 2:00 pm Tour: Paul Shaw’s Potluck Type Tour1:00 pm — 4:00 pm Special Event: Opening Night: Let the Babel Begin!7:30 pm – 11:00 pm Friday, August 20thMain ProgramLocation: Hyatt Regency Century Plaza 8:15 am 8:50 am 8:50 am 9:00 am Before someone visits Disneyland, they expect all type to be pink VAG Rundschrift with glossy highlights. The reality is different. Disneyland’s typography is a collection of detailed typographic compositions that form a narrative. Type is used as a vehicle to evoke an emotional response, and communicate a specific time and place. At the same time, much of the type is used to convey information that points the way to a restroom, exit, or specific attraction. How can several thematic approaches and hundreds of different typefaces work together harmoniously while enhancing the guest experience? How can type provide a sense of reassurance? And is it okay to make typography pleasant? 9:45 am We live in strange and exciting typographic times. Software offers genre templates that perpetuate timeworn conventions alongside powerful tools that enable innovation. Dimensional letters leap from flat surfaces; alphabets of every conceivable material are reproducible; letters tumble and morph on screen. In any given moment, reading convention, technology, material, and language align to deliver typography; the issue is, every moment is different. How can we embrace and build discourse that is inclusive of this “typogyroscopic” nature? Crisp has written a book that rethinks the rules of typography considering contemporary affordances and inclinations. One principle underpins her discussion: to master typography is to be conscious of and employ intersecting systems — forces that create the contexts within which we produce and interpret typography. She will present and show examples of concepts such as The Azif Factor, Maximus Facillium: Genres, Transformation and Replication Style, Real Deal, and Token Materiality (to name a few), which together strive to capture The Full Typographic Terrain. 10:30 am 11:00 am Using Stanley Morison’s thoughts in his celebrated Fleuron article as a springboard, this presentation will coagulate and clarify ideas of what an Italic design should strive for, based closely on what functions it needs to perform. Although Morison can be accused of applying the “slanted-Roman” idea too literally, that rara avis of font styles does possess ideological merit, in contrast to the bulk of past and present Italic designs which tend to be almost entirely servile to convention. This presentation will assess what went wrong in Morison’s application, expose obscure but promising precedents from the Deberny and Genzsch & Heyse foundries, as well as very recent designs such as Type Together’s Adelle, and, finally, suggest a sober path towards a judicious revival of the unduly maligned slanted-Roman. 11:20 am A discussion of exploratory techniques in digital letterpress via recent projects undertaken at The Bieler Press. 11:40 am Arabic calligraphy and dance could not be more different in terms of the reverence given to calligraphy in Arabic culture and the decadence that one sometimes sees in Arabic; or, more aptly put, Oriental dance. However, it is quite possible to trace similarities across these very different forms of artistic expression. Modes of expression, long sweeping moves, and the grace of movement are some common themes that can be easily highlighted. This presentation will explore the relationship that can be found in Arabic dance and calligraphy and will offer various examples of the movement of the pen versus the movement of the body. 12:00 pm New Zealand is a young, geographically isolated country, colonized in the late 1800s. Its colonial experience lead to a “rapid power of adaptability to circumstance,” developing into a cultural phenomenon known as the “No.8 Wire” mentality—which posits that anything can be fixed simply by fencing wire. Ever since native New Zealand Maori embraced and adapted Christianity from the first European missionaries, New Zealanders have freely borrowed from each other and abroad. “Cross-cultural pollination” is how they seem to have adapted—the country’s population is too small to survive on a diet of its own cultural output. Its youth and isolation explains the absence of a “Kiwi” typeface design history. This talk explores Sowersby’s practice of typeface design and how he’s dealt with the absence of his own cultural by working as they’ve always done—No.8 Wire and pollination. How does this relate to the theme of Babel? Well, according to wikipedia.com, in Babylon, during the third millennium, an intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Akkadians. Scholars refer to this period as a sprachbund. From the German word for “language union,” a sprachbund is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related. Sowersby sees his working method in a similar fashion, working through the specimen books and creating “unions” from various genetic typographic lines. 12:45 pm 2:15 pm Choosing fonts is an essential skill and, at the same time, a difficult task for designers. The purpose of this lecture is to present, in a funny way, a method of type selection that helps designers to make appropriate choices; taking into account the sender, purpose and historical period of the text, the culture, age and language of the reader, the meaning potential that type should reinforce, the levels of information, the reproduction process, and the degree of originality required for type. This multifactorial approach helps to avoid the pitfalls that typeface selection presents. 3:00 pm In this presentation, Rajpurohit will focus on the aspect of type design that is generally ignored and is also fairly complicated — the digitization of Indian scripts. So far, very little has been done in terms of standardization of any sort when it comes to digitization of Indian scripts. Being a part of the first true type foundry in India, Rajpurohit firmly believes that what they do now at ITF will set the standards for those who follow. Rajpurohit will focus on two major type design projects he has undertaken — Fedra Hindi, and Kohinoor Multiscript, which aims to be the largest typeface family ever created, including support for nine major Indian scripts in addition to Latin. 3:20 pm 3:30 pm 4:00 pm A series of short presentations on Web Fonts and related topics, moderated by John Hudson (Tiro Typeworks). Speakers include Roger Black (The End User Perspective), Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland (What is WOFF, and How does it Work?), Chris Lilley (The W3C Standards Process and Web Fonts), Raph Levien (The Google Font API), and Tim Brown (Font Metrics and the Web). 5:15 pm A diverse group of professionals will discuss recent advances, future plans, and the overall impact of Web Fonts. Participants include Bryan Mason, moderator (Typekit), Christopher Slye (Adobe), Bill Davis (Ascender), Tom Phinney (Extensis), Roger Black (Font Bureau), Adam Twardoch (FontLab/MyFonts), Raph Levien (Google), Erik van Blokland (LettError), Simon Daniels (Microsoft), Vladimir Levantovsky (Monotype Imaging), Shu-Yun Lai (Pereira & O'Dell), John Hudson (Tiro Typeworks), Tal Leming (Type Supply), Chris Lilley (W3C), and more. 6:30 pm EveningA free evening to meet up with old friends, make some new ones, and explore Los Angeles. Saturday, August 21stMain ProgramLocation: Hyatt Regency Century Plaza 8:30 am 9:00 am 9:00 am 9:05 am This title wasn’t his choice, but Porchez says this working title sounded nice and was French enough to be appealing, so he adopted it: Indeed, he will show several beautiful letters (that’s the point of a lecture at TypeCon). The main question that he will try to answer this year is: How much does designing typefaces require a different approach from other graphic design projects? Do graphic designers use the same layout or same concept for all their clients? No — a good graphic designer will create an obviously unique identity for each new project. As in graphic design, without any brief or any problem to solve, it becomes very difficult to create something new and interesting. What is the mystery ingredient that makes a good typefaces? Old projects never ending such as Parisine (or more recent works such as the designer’s Henderson, Retiro, Vuitton, among others) will help to explain in depth his typographic design process. Porchez says type design doesn’t require more skills than anything else — just a clear analysis of needs, proper discussion with a client, and, indeed, many hours of work as everything. 9:50 am Back in the 1940s, when all movie titles, posters, and lobby cards were done by hand, Harold Adler began his lettering career in the film industry. Amazingly, he not only survived all of the ensuing technological changes, but become a veritable trendsetter, creating the lettering for such renowned title designers as Saul Bass and Pablo Ferro. Remarkably, Adler worked into his 80s. While this presentation is primarily an overview of Adler’s work, life, and illustrious acquaintances, it also provides a glimpse at the evolution of film title design in Hollywood. 10:30 am 11:00 am This talk shows that a new kind of type design is possible, in particular one that:
The core of this change is a novel approach to support for semantic distinction between sections of text. Instead of the usual reliance on the three axes of distinction we are all familiar with — size, regular vs. bold, regular vs italic — this new approach to type design would take advantage of the ability of higher resolutions in screens to offer axes of distinctions based on style (many axes), as well as condensed forms, in italics (variations based more on letter construction than angle or slant), and small caps. This approach is especially useful for non latin scripts because it does not force the sometimes unnatural or difficult conventions to indicate semantic status. While a systematic approach to expanding semantic options is quite new, there are many positive precedents. This approach is actually grounded in fine typography. 11:20 am If you were teaching people to read, what font would you use? Many different ones have been used for languages with Latin letters, with varying degrees of success. Look-alike letters, missing characters, and changing technologies are just a few of today’s typographic challenges. Can a single font family meet the needs of new readers in diverse locations across the globe? Can it serve the goals of literacy educators as well? Can it avoid the pitfalls of some commonly available fonts? New tools and thoughtful design may make this possible. 11:40 am A presentation of a letterpress work in progress that forces type to behave as part of an emergent system. This is a creative project, a new artists’ bookwork. 12:00 am OpenType, with its numerous options for alternate characters, has made script typefaces more natural and realistic than they have ever been. At the same time, such scripts, while wildly popular, have become more difficult to use, blunting their full potential. This presentation will summarize the historical evolution of script typefaces, examine the state of OpenType script fonts today, show the possibilities such fonts offer to the graphic designer/typographer, and, in conclusion, provide a step-by-step guide to how to achieve expert results. 12:20 pm Artist Chaz Bojórquez has been immersed in the graffiti tradition of East Los Angeles Mexican Americans since the 1950s. He has combined graffiti, his formal fine art education, and extensive Asian calligraphy studies, becoming one of the best-known and most original graffiti artists from Los Angeles. Bojórquez will speak about its cultural history, international influence, and contemporary applications that define his experience as well as his philosophy about the value and execution of letters. 1:00 pm 1:00 pm 2:30 pm With an introduction by Juliet Shen: Serif fonts are read faster than sans serif fonts, except for on screen. A bad fi clash will cause the reader to stumble. Web surfers are blind to banner ads on web pages. A row of dots in a table of contents makes it easier to find the page numbers. When making real-world design decisions, assumptions must be made in order to get anything done. Some of these assumptions are right, and some of these assumptions are wrong, but how do we tell them apart? In this talk, Larson will propose a course on empirical research methods that he believes should be a part of every typographer’s education. 3:00 pm Letterpress printing and book arts have recently enjoyed a huge resurgence in popularity in current graphic design practice and university design curriculums both in the US and abroad. A parallel can be drawn between this swing-of-the-pendulum from digital environments to a fascination with handmade crafts and the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts Movement’s celebration of traditional craft as a reaction against factory-made objects. Joey Hannaford and Jeff Pulaski are graphic design faculty whose university programs have recently begun to include the traditional craft of letterpress printing as a component of their largely digital-based curricula. They have found this to be an effective way of increasing the design student’s knowledge of design history, respect for materials, craftsmanship, and appreciation and awareness of the impact of current digital technology on their design decision-making process. This presentation inquires into how current design students absorb and apply the basic concepts of typography when their only life-experience of these disciplines has been exclusively digitally based. The presenters will describe each of their program’s approaches to incorporating this return to the past not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a means to re-connect, reinforce, and instill in the design student the typographic vernacular of the past in the hope that this will develop new typographers who are more attentive (in the Buddhist sense of the word) to typography’s higher purpose. 3:35 pm Manchester in England is well known as the world’s first industrial city — built for the manufacture of cotton fabric in factories that boasted, “We make for Britain before breakfast, and for the rest of the World after.” By the 1880s, 85% of all fabric in the world came from Manchester. What hasn’t been known until recently was that the merchants who sold up to 250 million cloth pieces a year stamped them with the most ornate typography and images, designed to appeal to buyers in specific markets around the world. Hindu goddesses, Chinese fables, Latin American scenes, African views, and ethnic art from every cultural group in the world was used to appeal to native buyers. This is as far from modern global branding and established ideas about ignorant Empire merchants as it gets. What’s more, the technology used to stamp the designs on the fabric developed from fabric printing rather than paper printing and was a secretive business. Rather than cast metal or carved wood, stamps could take a month to make, by hammering strips of copper into wooden blocks in the most intricate yet accurate ways. The typefaces used were varied, with many unique to the textile trade, so this will be the first time in over 100 years most of these fonts have been seen. As the Manchester cotton trade withered to nothing, merchants closed their doors and most stamps were burnt or dumped. Luckily, Adrian Wilson managed to save a few thousand stamps and related ephemera. He was inspired by Carol Wahler to give the first talk on his collection at the TDC earlier this year, and is now set to reveal even more of his previously unseen collection at TypeCon. 4:15 pm 4:45 pm The lettering artist, type designer, writer, and educator will discuss his fonts, his work for the entertainment industry, hotel logos, academia, brand identity, the sports world, and an homage to Hermann and Gudrun Zapf. Also featured: a look at his latest type design and his new book, Learning Curves. 5:30 pm Friends and colleagues of Doyald Young will discuss his body of work, his role as an educator, and deliver new insights into the creative spirit, elegance, and wit of Art Center’s “Inaugural Master of the College.” 6:15 pm 6:15 pm Special Event: Adventures in La La Land8:30 pm – 12:00 am Sunday, August 22ndMain ProgramLocation: Hyatt Regency Century Plaza 8:30 am 9:10 am 9:10 am 9:15 am “Transitional” is a controversial label in type design history. Some value the term for offering a finer-grained distinction between the longstanding categories of Oldstyle and Modern letterforms. Others argue that it implies a historical development that the facts do not bear out. This presentation will investigate the historical context of the term’s emergence. Though arguably inaccurate and even inherently problematic, the emergent “transitional” label for type designs fit with changing paradigms of cultural history in the period between the World Wars. 9:55 am This session offers an exploration of the work of Charles Eames and his influence on graphic design. Andrew Byrom will take the Eames 1972 short film Design Q & A as a starting point and lead a discussion on how the questions (and answers) posed in this film inspire/relate to contemporary graphic design and, perhaps more importantly, to ask what are the new questions for our times. Design Q & A shown courtesy of Eames Office, LLC 10:55 am 11:25 am In 2009–2010, the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications commissioned the development of two type families — PT Sans and PT Serif. The intention was to develop a set of fonts that could serve all official languages of the Russian Federation and make them publicly available. Russian territory is inhabited by many peoples using about 200 languages; around 50 of them have official status. On one hand, the project is an example of collaboration between linguists and type designers; on the other hand, it’s an example of proper attitude of government to type design. PT Sans was released at the end of December 2009 and is already widely used within and outside of Russia. PT Serif will be released later this year. See the ParaType site for details. 11:45 am Green Olive Media is a design company focused on the food, beverage and restaurant industry. The GOM creatives place particular emphasis on the importance of type in their work, and will present an overview of how they bring type to the forefront of their design work when creating identities and brands for restaurant and food and beverage clients. 12:05 am Calligrapher Lisa Engelbrecht will discuss how diverse forms of lettering and those who create alphabetical art can work together harmoniously, bridging the gap between, styles, cultures, and generations. 12:25 am In 1961, The Ad Club, one of the oldest professional clubs in New Orleans, asked the fledgling Art Directors and Designers Association to make a presentation introducing itself and its members: typesetters, lettering specialists, art directors, designers, creative directors, stat-camera operators, comp, board, and key-line artists. With funds from an AIGA Katrina Relief Grant and AIGA New Orleans, the original 35mm slide show and accompanying reel-to-reel audio tapes have been digitized and re-synchronized. Join Collins for the Gulf Coast version of the TV show, Mad Men. 12:45 pm 12:45 pm 2:15 pm Lushootseed is a family of languages spoken by the Native American tribes living around Puget Sound in Washington state. It is classified by UNESCO as severely endangered, the last category before extinction. In 2009, Shen was hired by The Tulalip Tribes, who are actively working to bring the language back to everyday use, to design a Unicode-compliant digital font for Lushootseed. She based her design on universal shapes in traditional Salish wood carving, so translating the digital design into wood type seemed the natural way to go when setting up a letterpress print shop for the tribes’ language department. Under director Jim Moran and creative director Bill Moran, the Hamilton Museum of Wood Type & Printing has transformed itself from a dusty depository of artifacts to a living museum. The cutting of Matthew Carter’s original wood typeface, Van Lanen, and the Tulalip Lushootseed project are two initiatives indicative of the museum’s new vitality. Bill Moran will describe the risks and rewards of using a computer-driven laser cutter in combination with a traditional pantographic router, and how retired employees who have returned to Hamilton with their almost-lost skills are a vital part of the effort. 2:35 pm You’ve heard about BlueFuzz, but you don’t quite understand what it is? You’ve read the manual cover to cover, but still have no clue of what BlueScale or BlueShift values to use? If you ever wanted to know what this Blue stuff is about but you couldn’t find enough information on the web, and the Type 1 specification also didn’t help that much, then this presentation is for you. Sousa will explain each of these three hinting parameters and demonstrate how they affect the rasterization. He will also provide methods for calculating and testing the appropriate values. By the end of the session, you should expect to have a good grasp of these Blues. 2:55 pm The Caldecott Medal is the top award for American children’s picture books, and the winners are often best-sellers. Thomas Phinney and Dr. Lesley Colabucci studied the typography of the 88 books honored from 1990–2010. Phinney will share their analysis in this presentation, along with some thoughts on the state of typography in children’s books in general. The results of their research will also be published later this year in Children & Libraries, a journal of the American Library Association. 3:15 pm In the spring of 2009, Michael Doret released a new font design called Deliscript, which was loosely based on the neon signage over Canter’s Deli (a famed eatery located in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles). Less than a year later, Doret became involved in a series of events involving the convergence of three factors: 1) the original inspiration for Deliscript, 2) a Google search, and 3) a young entrepreneur. Doret will talk about how these events serendipitously led him down the road towards earning a lifetime’s worth of pastrami sandwiches. 3:35 pm Gutenberg’s font is fascinating in its adaptation of fifteenth-century German manuscript hands. The numerous ligatures and contractions are evidence of the attempt to fit text into the narrow measure of a double column on a page. Scripps College Press students recreated one page of the Bible using B-42 type in metal as part of a semester-long collaborative book project. This lecture will detail the sorting of the 246-character font into type cases, explain the strategy of closely copying Gutenberg’s methods, and summarize what the group learned from the experience. 4:15 pm 4:45 pm The growth of the Internet in Iran brought with it the beginning of a sub-language called “P‐English” by which chat and email users utilize Roman English characters to convey messages in Farsi. While communicating in P‐English can never be seen as a genuine replacement to the Farsi alphabet, it can be seen as a communication tool to convey Persian cultural values. Along with all new possibilities which P‐English offers to the Farsi community, there are some issues that must be addressed. The biggest problem is that there is no standard for writing vowels in P‐English. For example, a certain word in Farsi could be written in various combinations in P‐English. Anvari’s research is a practical approach to set standard for P‐English. As a result, this project could encourage P‐English users to not only utilize it for speedy communication, but also to incorporate it in serious publications. Such movement can benefit the second generation of Persians living overseas and help them to get in touch with their cultural roots. 5:05 pm Why is it that children can often identify corporate brands before they can identify letters and words? Companies use strategic positioning and application as well as repetition to build recognition of their products and services to consumers As a result, children become familiar with the shapes, colors, and imagery used in logos and logotypes without knowing the letterforms used to create these brand images. In stark contrast to this systematic approach is the inconsistent manner in which typography is presented to children in educational and recreational reading materials, games, and toys. This presentation explores these inconsistencies, the confusion they present to children and parents — while offering possible graphic, systematic, holistic solutions. 5:25 pm A very exciting and inspirational body of work, both print and motion. Milka Broukhim showcases her personal design experimentation and the work of her students, specifically how ideas may be signified and visually communicated as liquid typography. When type is in motion, its form may become fluid, thus it may function as a texture, a visual aesthetic gratification or a seduction rather than as a readable text. Thus, this presentation explores this process of visual representation on how this may convey a meaning, how it may construct or signify another layer of meaning in a context or story when type is in a fluid and liquid stage, and how to better understand the visual signals that we enjoy so much in liquid typography. 5:45 pm SfC members take us on a trip through time as they demonstrate the evolution of written communication. This lively group presentation features a review of Pictograms, Heiroglyphics, Phoenician, Cuneiform, then moves into Roman, Uncial, Carolingean, and Gothic styles. Get your hands on papyrus plant and paper, vellum, feather quills, and reeds, and get inspired to take up your own pen during a lesson on Gothic lettering. 6:25 pm Special Event: Southland Tales: A Wind Down7:30 pm – 11:00 pm |
