TypeLab is a free 72-hour online event, with workshops, demos, interviews, experiments, and more.
TypeLab is an informal, multi-day, typographic hackathon coordinated by Petr van Blokland to complement to the main Typographics conference and workshops. Like the original TypeLab events in the 1990s, it is a place for people to meet and talk about type and design with an informal structure that allows more spontaneity and interaction than typical mainstage conference events.
TypeLab’s schedule is a global, with hosts and participants around the world livestreaming on three parallel channels:
TypeLab events will be hosted on Zoom. Each of our 3 international hosts will manage their own separate Zoom meetings.
To actively participate, you must register for TypeLab. Registered attendees will be emailed info for joining the Zoom meetings, where they can interact with other attendees and presenters, and enjoy the best video quality.
Public livestreams will also be on YouTube via one of our 3 international hosts (Americas, Europe, and Asia). No registration is required to view the public livestreams but viewers will not be able to interact with other attendees and presenters, and the video quality may be reduced.
A few TypeLab events have their own separate registration due to limited capacity. Those events have info and registration links in their schedule descriptions.
Recordings of TypeLab will not be published after TypeLab has ended due to copyright and privacy concerns. TypeLab is a singular event – embrace the impermanence!
TypeLab events will continue 24 hours a day for three full days.
Event programming will constantly evolve until the final event has ended, allowing for spontaneous alterations and additions as space and time allow. The schedule is always very much subject to change at any time, without notice. For updates and announcements, join the Typographics mailing list and follow @TypographicsNYC on Twitter.
📅 Add the TypeLab schedule to your calendar app of choice with our public calendars.
TypeLab Day 1: Type Day
Starts , at and ends , at
Times are shown in your current time zone (EDT/UTC-4)
Colored symbols correspond to the livestream channel for each event:
TypeLab Americas
TypeLab Europe
TypeLab Asia
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Get breakfast with the organizers. Ask questions and get answers over a cup of coffee. What to expect from this TypeLab. Last-minute preparations for the talks and workshops. Flashing the Google spreadsheets covering the design process of the program.
The presentation will be based on how I designed a type family– Balcony, inspired by metal safety grills. This includes initial documentation of grills that I came across and how I further developed it.
Hidden ghost signs have been discovered in Shanghai through the cracks of the rapid urban regeneration, but most of them were removed soon after. These signs were a microcosm of China’s language reform and changing writing patterns. The Type worked with three photographers who spent over six years to capture the ephemeral appearance of those typography gems and triggered wide discussions with an independent publication.
In 21 years, the Tupigrafia magazine has published 13 issues, with 23 different covers. Each one shows a different logo, some with types or letterings created exclusively for the publication. Tupigrafia has featured more than 150 articles on typographic history and technology, type design, calligraphy and letterpress.
There is a rising (new) term in the field of typedesign. Let’s talk about »uniwidth« typefaces! First of all – from a user’s perspective: What does uniwidth mean? What is the difference to monospace? What are the advantages, and are there weak spots? We will explore use cases in print and web design. After that, I will add the typedesigner’s view on the topic: I will talk about my recent collaboration with Prof. Heitmann and our work on his uniwidth superfamilies, about technical obstacles and one of our main challenges: testing.
The Typecraft Initiative develops a range of display typefaces based on the rich crafts and tribal arts of India. While the end product is a font, the goal of the initiative goes much further. Typecraft is interested in raising larger socio-geopolitical issues such as gender and minority rights through the creation of its typefaces. Working on letters with women in a largely patriarchal society — where more boys are sent to school than girls — makes a statement by reinforcing connections between letters and women which sometimes leads to changes, even if small, in these communities. Each community can be identified by their unique use of motifs and icons manifested in the crafts they make and wear.
Typecraft is then a call to action both symbolically and practically, to raise questions about marginalized communities, their identities, and the role of women, who, through their crafts, shape and reshape this identity.
Behind the scenes: TypeMedia final projects showcase: The class from 2021 will discuss the process behind each project: ten students will go through their work sharing with the audience ideas, drawings and design choices that brought them to the final result. Visit typemedia.org for more info and contacts.
Schedule here in Dutch time:
11:30 – 11:40 Introduction
11:40 – 11:55 Neva
11:55 – 12:10 Ivo
12:10 – 12:25 Sander
12:25 – 12:40 Caterina
12:40 – 12:55 Léna
12:55 – 13:10 Edward
13:10 – 13:25 Stef
13:25 – 13:40 Lukas
13:40 – 13:55 Gajana
13:55 – 14:10 Alex
14:10 – 15:00 Q & A
The aim of the workshop is to not only expose participants to different crafts; but additionally by having them work on making shapes, forms and letters based on the visual language of a craft, they get to understand the nuances of how a craft is made and its characteristics in more detail. Please register for this workshop to participate. Space is limited. Materials needed and notes on how to prepare are on the listing for registration in Eventbrite.
The process of designing a variable font that works across Latin and Devanagri Script. Using the “transliteration axis” to transform the Latin alphabet to have it phonetically spelled out using the Devanagri script. I would break down the steps and explain the logic of the connections.
Type63 is an initiative that aims to celebrate and showcase Filipino type design — ranging from custom type for projects to fully realized typefaces and typographic layouts. The type design community is fairly young in the Philippines, which means we are only starting to come together as designers in the field and sharing work with one another. Type63 hopes to document the ways in which we develop our own work and how we respond to global design influences that also inform our practice.
For this presentation, Jo will share the range of work made in the Philippines and highlight a few examples that present unique challenges that type designers are responding to, specific to local experiences/context.
For a young nation having only celebrated its 50th year in 2015, the search for cultural identity in Singapore remains a constant question as its people, landscape and economy move relentlessly in the name of “progress”. Just as signage and typographical vernacular in big cities like New York, London and Paris contribute to the visual culture and national identity, could Singapore’s fast eroding post-war typographical heritage continue to inform post-millennial identity and culture?
Just like our societies, typefaces are made from what we learned from the past. We are constantly building upon what have been done before. The last decades allowed a lot more experimentations in typography, and even more recently (still?) there was a huge re-interest in ‘Grotesk’ letterforms… I will describe the design process of a ‘Didot’ typeface I started two years ago, explaining it’s contention between new/old and how I tried to find a balance between two worlds.
With the support of the Dutch Cultural Funds for Design, a project by Tarek Atrissi Design (the Netherlands) and Al-Qalam foundation (Cairo) aimed at encouraging Arabic typographic experiments in Egypt: through research of graphic, calligraphic and lettering heritage and exploring it as inspiration for designing new Arabic typefaces. This talk will give an overview of this ongoing project in its research, educational and design components.
David Jonathan Ross will briefly talk about the decorative ornaments from his most recent typeface, Fern Text, followed by a demo of the DrawBot script he created to help users quickly and easily use the typeface to generate borders and patterns.
‘Fairness by design’ often comes up in studies about algorithms, computational data, and machine learning; however, there is relatively little mention of fairness research in information design, and the impact on how documents — specifically government forms — can benefit from such approaches. In this short lecture I introduce the principle ‘form follows fairness’ as a new way of thinking about how government digital forms are designed. The ‘form follows fairness’ method examines the relationships between complexity of documents and provision of typographic opportunities, to establish equity of outcome for every user regardless of individual circumstances or privileges, i.e. greater literacy, clarity, and technology. Government forms design has thus far been analysed largely in terms of bureaucratic needs and their concomitant impact on data collection; this method reassesses current practices through the lens of typographic cues and opportunities which government agencies can natively design into their forms. I thus aim to locate fairness within the wider practice of information design, with the intention of demonstrating clearer procedures for form issuers and better outcomes for users.
This project began in 2019 when we made a field study about the typefaces used in educational books, created by the Ministry of Education in Mexico, for learning to read. These books are supposed to be suitable for children between 5 and 7 years old. From this research, we realized some premises and details that would help facilitate children’s learning in the process of reading. From there, we have designed a typeface with the purpose to enhance the reading learning experience during our residence at Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography in February 2021.
Tiffin (by Salomi Desai): A Latin and Devanagari typeface for literary magazines Ploquine (by Emma Marichal) : An interactive typeface family with influences from woodtype. You can find more details on the EsadType website : postdiplome.esad-amiens.fr
At the beginning of 2021, Miguel Reyes drew a new script typeface called Candy Darling for Interview magazine. This typeface sits at the intersection of chaos and careful engineering, good and bad taste, peep show neon and Doyald Young. Miguel will talk about how he synthesized these different ideas into a cohesive whole and how the magazine’s designers bring it to life.
I’ll present a quick summary of the current state of my research on the methods and semantic/creative nature and potential of constructed scripts—systems of drawn and typographic glyphs that diagram their own structure and process of design. I’ve gathered lots of examples of what (my research shows) are the three methods of designing these scripts—rasterization, rationalization, and modularity. But with only a couple exceptions, all of my examples represent the Latin writing system. After sharing representative examples from my collection, I’ll ask the audience—a self-identified group of engaged and active typographers and type designers around the world—for help finding examples from other writing systems. Only by getting outside the context of the Latin alphabet will I be able to know how solid my findings are, and how relevant and useful they might be to international designers, design researchers and educators.
Between 2019 and 2020 we were commissioned by Anna Kulachek to create a new wordmark for the oldest cinema theatre in Moscow “The Khudozhentvenny”. Creating a wordmark for the more than 20-character long name of a cherished cultural institution was a design challenge from the very start. More over the project rapidly turned into a custom typeface with an unconventional story.
We both work with letterforms and typography in clay. For this presentation we will each briefly present and discuss our work, and then talk a bit together and with the audience about using type and language in the medium of clay.
Hoy en día podemos encontrar tantos tipos de letra como formas de pensar en torno a la tipografía. Cada proyecto comienza con un proceso de diseño particular definido por la mentalidad y los antecedentes de cada diseñadorx. Esto da como resultado una variedad de proyectos que intentan mantener posturas más clásicas u otros con exploraciones que van más allá de los límites. Pero, ¿qué sucede cuando dos mentes completamente diferentes establecen el mismo objetivo? June simboliza la conjunción entre un método clásico y otro disruptivo, y cómo esa extraña unión se expresa a través de un concepto de fuente variable experimental.
Esta charla mostrará el proceso de creación detrás de esta tipografía, pero no intentaremos presentar una descripción general del producto final, sino dos posibles procesos para generar ideas en dos flujos de trabajo independientes que se presentarán uno frente al otro.
Fer está representada por Curious, el hemisferio derecho, quien intenta desafiarse continuamente a sí misma buscando nuevas formas de expresar sus ideas. Tiene una visión panorámica, mirando el presente y el futuro de modo impetuoso y se arriesgado.
Por otro lado, Oscar está representado por Active, el hemisferio izquierdo, una forma estructurada que sigue un método preciso paso a paso. Este lado se enfoca en detalles, percepción de patrones, estrategias y cosas prácticas.
Estos extremos crean un complejo sistema de instancias intermedias con diferentes gustos y texturas, que fueron el motivo de este experimento.
For minority scripts such as the Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, font design must typically begin with community outreach, rather than drawing, to first understand local Indigenous needs and the technical barriers they face with digital text. This talk explores the process of building relationships with underrepresented Indigenous communities in Canada, conducting research with them, and proposing additions and amendments to the Unicode Standard which lay the foundation for more comprehensive Syllabics typefaces.
Penny Farthing is a Letraset typeface by Bob Newman that let designers create letter combinations between caps and smaller version of the caps by nesting and stacking them. What would it take to make an OpenType version? Let’s look at the code!
My presentation will be about the process of designing a complex typeface for the first time. And the problems and things i’ve learned so far that i find important to share. The typeface is called Oniresi and was designed during the Type@Cooper’s workshop Principles of Typeface Design: Display Type, in the Fall of 2020, to suit and celebrate the specificities of the Yoruba (Èdé Yorùbá) language. The project was first created in the 80’s by Professor Dr. Victor Manfredi (African Studies Center of Boston University) and developed with the help of a famous german type designer. Back then, the idea was to create one unified character map for typewriters and typesetting that contemplated the most common languages in Nigeria, in addition to Yoruba, English, Igbo and Hausa.
My goal was (and still is, as i’m still working on it) to apply a critical view by approaching the original drawings with another mindset and listening to current communication needs of the Yoruba users in the digital era. In Unicode, the Yoruba diacritics are inconsistent (above and especially below the letters) and wrongly considered to be optional rather than essential for reading and writing. Oniresi is not a revival, it’s an endeavor to take another path. One that leaves behind what we no longer want to perpetuate.
Variable fonts have hit the ground running, enriching the current typographic landscape. So what about the next thing: variable color fonts? In this talk and demonstration I will show you the many possibilities this technology offers.
A demonstration and lecture about how to best use variable fonts in InDesign and Illustrator for dynamic print and identity design projects, the current issues and bugs in the software, and how to work around them
Talk details the development of Polymode, a custom variable typeface family for Polymode Studio. With a Realness axis, going from Acting Basic to Opulence, the typeface tries to express a wide range of voices that the studio speaks in.
Usina es un proyecto tipográfico que se inspira en las letras de la fachada del laboratorio y subestaciones de la UTE (Compañía eléctrica del estado uruguayo).
Su objetivo es contribuir a la cultura nacional al reconocer la herencia tipográfica y arquitectónica de Montevideo.
La historia, muchas veces dada por cotidiana, otorga valor al paisaje inadvertido y permanente en el tiempo. La iniciativa muestra lo importante del oficio, ofrece un momento para observar los destellos de una estética que nos pertenece.
Teen Titans GO! storyboard artist and writer Talya Perper will talk with Dan Rhatigan about a recent episode of the cartoon called “Zimdings” (a thinly veiled alt for Wingdings) that heavily features typography, font snobbery, and the like.
En esta presentación me gustaría hablar sobre el rescate tipográfico que realicé en torno al trabajo tipográfico de Enrico Martínez quien fue el sexto impresor de México y América, estuvo activo a finales del siglo XVI y principios del XVII. Fue un hombre que trabajó y dominó diversas materias, entre las que encontramos la astrología, la cartografía, la ingeniería civil y por supuesto la imprenta. A lo largo de su vida talló y fundió siete fuentes tipográficas, siendo la quinta de ellas la mejor lograda. Para realizar el rescate tipográfico tomé como referencia aquella quinta fuente que además Enrico utilizo para imprimir su obra más celebre “El repertorio de los tiempos”, título para el cual no solo escribió el contenido, además realizó material tipográfico para su impresión.
Mazumbá es una familia tipográfica diseñada en el marco de la Maestría en Tipografía (FADU - UBA) que se inspira en el sonido de los tambores del Candombe, ritmo afro-uruguayo, declarado Patrimonio Cultural Inmaterial de la Humanidad por la UNESCO.
Explora la sonoridad, tensión del sonido generado por los tambores tradicionales del Candombe (piano, repique y chico) e intenta responder a las preguntas: ¿De qué manera el sonido se vuelve forma? ¿Qué forma vuelve a una letra Candombe?
Mazumbá es una familia tipográfica compuesta por 4 variables: regular, itálica y negrita para textos; y una variable display, la negra. Cada una, pensada para resolver diversas situaciones de diseño dentro de la composición de piezas que contengan pentagrama. Hace foco en la convivencia entre la escritura latina y la notación musical y tiene por objetivo colaborar en la transmisión de conocimiento, cultura y tradición uruguaya.
Actualmente se encuentra en estado de expansión (negrita itálica y negra itálica) y presenta bocetos para incluir la notación musical en una segunda etapa de publicación.
Cadson Demak is a long running type design studio based in Bangkok, Thailand. Serving Southeast asian and and localising brand type to speak like a local they are also known for design consultation and specialise in branding with type.
This studio tour will show you where they‘re located, the office environment along with some short interview with type designers that we encounter on Friday. We will also tour the studio bookshelf and the collection of Thai script resources. Q&A is also welcome at the end.
Discussing process and approach as she draws one of her in-progress Devanagari typefaces. Includes: Live drawing via screen-share, some rambling and Q&A.
The Irregular Times publication is an opportunity to provide new perspectives at the intersection of art, media, activism, politics, and contemporary culture. With the quarterly issue, Tarini and Anant aim to amplify the endless possibilities of zine making, and zine culture in India.
A demonstration on how I analyse printed type and how I compare two types that look similar. For my PhD thesis (A new method of analysing printed type: the case of 15th-century Venetian romans, Reading University, 2019) I have developed a new method for analysing and comparing printed type based on photographic enlargements, on image editing and on detailed analysis of the letterforms.
Get an early look into a new tool for quality testing fonts and preparing them for release. See a live demo of the current state, hear about our design & development journey and suggest a name for this yet-to-be-named tool being developed by Miranj and guided by Universal Thirst.
Unlike English is phonetic. Chinese is a pictographic language. Most Chinese characters are composed of two or more components. So just within a single word, it can contain multidimensional semantic relationships, and there are several principles behind them. I will show you how I apply some of these principles, to deconstruct and reconstruct this pictographic language with translations, and generate some new narratives.
Explore the area of type, illustration, sound and translation with Tamara Arkatova and Zrinka Buljubašić.
We’ll be looking into translation between acoustic and graphic and exploring area of lettering and onomatopoeia sounds. Join us in this 4-hour workshop of drawing letters as a written expression of acoustic sensation.
Please join us and register here: https://bit.ly/3iKsXzT
Studio tour with neon sign maker Evan Voyles of The Neon Jungle. Having made over 500 signs lighting up the streets of Austin, TX, Evan shares his story of writing letters in lights. Framed in metal and glass, his signs are both theatrical and functional with the sole job of getting you to look and step inside the store. So stop on by and say hello.
The demo will address the basics of building digital assistants, that keep track of everything you don’t want to think about then you are drawing. While you are drawing. (This could grow into a workshops of 1-1.5 hr)
Based on the San Francisco Bay, the And Repeat Studio Tour will highlight the studio’s collaborations with artists and designers from all over the world. We will be looking at type, corporate design work, and art projects—how they all work together and how they generate a diverse, evolving body of work. Marty will be joined by Arsh and Maya Shetty from the And Repeat team.
Please RSVP for this event separately from TypeLab. A special Zoom webinar link will be sent to you via Eventbrite.
Shaw will lead us on a detailed (even nerdy) look at the evolution of Klinger’s lettering and type, placing him in context with Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller and other members of the Vienna Secession; and the German sachplakat artists, such as Lucian Bernhard, associated with the printers Hollerbaum & Schmidt.
John will review a few typefaces designer’s text typefaces. Sign up and then send us your proofs for a chance to be selected for critique. Space is limited.
Be prepared to bring Roman & Italic proofs. The proof pdf should include a complete character set of U&lc, lining, and oldstyle figures & punctuations (diacritics not necessary). Also include body copy settings that are flush left at 8 pt, 10 pt, and 12 pt.
The talk I wish I’d heard when I was starting out about font production, font engineering, mastering 101 in Spanish. Learn about the fundamental steps in the font mastering process, what are the tools for each called, basics on how they work and where to go for more information.
Tired of managing variable font glyph substitutions using text in .designspace files or Glyphs.app bracket layers? Nic Schumann and Marie Otsuka will present a demo of the Variable Font Visualizer, an open source web-based tool we developed to help managing complex FeatureVariations – glyph substitutions records – across the design-spaces of multi-axis variable fonts.
A quick demo showing how shell scripts can help you make font build pipelines that are easy to set up, easy to extend, and stable over the long term. What are shell scripts, anyway? Anything you can run in the terminal (and this is more than you might think), you can write in a shell script to run again later. These scripts can sequence multiple command-line tools and Python scripts, name and organize files, and more. This allows you to set up some powerful but simple workflows – all without having to remember any special options in the terminal.
A demo of the Mini Proofer—a plugin for generating font proofs. The Mini Proofer has an intuitive UI for creating an assortment of proof layouts, editing repetitive spacing strings, and exporting PDFs. Read more about it at miniproofer.com.
En este mini taller / demostración mostraré cómo se pueden explorar las herramientas propias y otros objetos no tradicionales para realizar trazos caligráficos.
Se invita a que las y los participantes tengan papeles, tinta y materiales que les gustaría utilizar para explorar trazos caligráficos con ellos. Ejemplos de materiales pueden ser: pinceles, plumas (tradicionales), cepillo de dientes, cuchara, tenedor, palillos, ramas, entre otros.
Having control on the different stages in your project is important because you can have a track of every change you make to your files and Git is a tool that you can use to organize your workflow both individually and in team, allowing you to improve the efficiency of your production process.
“Torneo tipográfico” was an online event that took place during the 2020 lockdown. The tournament produced 8 collaborative typefaces and a series of team competitions. In the presentation, I will share some results, experiences and learnings from the tournament, proposed as a way to create community through friendly competition, teaching and learning.
Join our guests Lygia Pires, Ying Chang, Kyle Letendre, Leo Calderón, Zrinka Buljubasic, Kel Troughton, and Aline Kaori for an hour of lettering fun, casual conversation, and insights into their process and journey. Bring your questions, grab your paper & pencil, and come have fun with us.
Times are shown in your current time zone (EDT/UTC-4)
Colored symbols correspond to the livestream channel for each event:
TypeLab Americas
TypeLab Europe
TypeLab Asia
–
Kashmir Type Hunt is a design community-based in Kashmir. Our motive is to document and archive indigenous type forms. The goal is to build awareness about design and type forms around us. What started as individuals documenting type has now evolved into a community where everyone can submit their find thus documenting and showcasing for all the people out there.
The Typefaces are faces in type. An award winning book for the designer in every child and the child in every designer. We’ve had two exhibitions, a talk at Apple and much more. design-positive.com/the-typefaces
This presentation is all about Santi’s private typewriter collection. We will focus on the topic of Thai letterforms in the typewriter.
Santi is a visiting lecturer at Communication Design, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He’s also co-founder of Witti studio–Graphic & Risograph printing studio in Bangkok. Apart from his weekday jobs, he also has a strong passion for archiving vintage stuff, including typewriters.
Along with Santi’s presentation, Promphan will also be the moderator helping him with the Q&A session. She’s a type designer based in Bangkok, Thailand. Also, She will talk about the differences in each style of the letterforms in each typewriter.
It is also an open discussion for any typewriter collectors out there; we’re open to hearing any new information we might be missing.
An overview and introduction to my research area, which investigates print production technology advertising images, to explore the employment of women within the male-orientated heritage of print production. The post-war era (1945-85) is the focus period for my research.
Since the cinematographe invention to the current times, there were a key role of typography into movies, and how it becomes a relevant element on communication. I gonna focus on the title credits through cinema history with a visual journey from early 1900s to after 2000s and today.
Three years after launching as a practical resource for finding and trying variable fonts, v-fonts.com is getting a round of simple but powerful updates. Though things will look similar on the surface, the site’s new capabilities help make it more useful for browsing all the variable fonts out there, and maybe learning some things in the process. Founder and editor Nick Sherman, along with collaborator Piper Haywood, will do a quick recap of the new features developed, and also talk about other features coming soon for the site.
Even when trapped behind our computer screens, variable typography behaves as if it were physical: it stretches, it compresses, it thickens, it thins, and animates. Designers Kelli Anderson and Kelcey Gray have been experimenting with various interactive paper metaphors to better express the dynamic reality of these new typographic conditions. In this workshop, we’ll make a stretchable letter and then play around with how to extend our model into a larger type specimen. Participants will use paper, pencil, and scissors to build folded paper structures that will serve as scaffolding for typographic manipulation.
Este es el resultado de un proyecto de investigación de tesis en la licenciatura de Diseño Gráfico de la BUAP: una color font inspirada en los populares rótulos de sonidero. Presentaremos su conceptualización y una pequeña reflexión sobre las tecnologías tipográficas. (This is a project done by bachelor students involving research and typeface design, in the form of a color font inspired by mexican lettering known as “Sonidero”)
In this Lettering Solitaire Game, we will divide participants into small groups after a short presentation on lettering, observation, and game rules. In each small group, we will start out drawing one letter and pass that onto the next person who will draw the following letter based on the initial design and go on. With this game, participants will learn how to observe and recreate on top of making new type-loving friends! Space in this workshop is limited. A link to sign up to join will be available here soon. Register for this workshop to participate. Space is limited.
In 2018, Céline Hurka released Alfarn and Hidetaka Yamasaki created CarlMarx, as part of the Adobe Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau Project. CarlMarx is a typeface based on a lettering sketch (lettering practice in a lecture) from 1932 by Carl Marx, a painter (Bauhaus student at that time). Hide is now working on the expansion of CarlMarx – adding a handwritten style to both weights. The previous version of CarlMarx was drawn with clean, straightforward Beziér curves, whereas the new version is created from scanned data of handwriting. Céline is currently expanding Alfarn with a brand new lowercase. Alfarn is based on a hand-lettered poster by Alfred Arndt from 1923.
I researched the history of San Francisco’s signature street signs, and came up with a story about automobile culture, federal letterform guidelines, and how typography and design in public wayfinding becomes part of the personality of place. As a tangent to the research, I revived a short-lived midcentury local sign font I call Fog City Gothic. I’d like to present a very visual history of San Francisco street signs, in hopes that designers not familiar with this domain will find something useful to consider in their work.
Asemic writing is a method of gestural writing devoid of any obvious semantics. But in this presentation, I will argue that writing – or calligraphy, sketches, digitizations, and/or code – are never without meaning.
I will begin by defining asemic writing, then explain the relationship to typography through a historic overview that covers origins from Chinese calligraphy (800 CE), to present day “code poems” that can only be read by computers. I will touch on the parallel between readability vs legibility and seeing vs reading, and hope to prove that even if we don’t understand a composition, we can always draw meaning from the source, a tool we recognize, or association we connect with.
I will close by arguing that what we lose in semantics, we gain in accessibility. When we create and consume asemic writing we open the door to potentially infinite, equally meaningful, interpretations.
We just recently launched Times New Woman – a community that aims to help and support women to grow in the type design industry – and we want to present our project and also present a research and impressions we have come across in out experiences about women in the field: What’s the ratio between men and women in the field? What is the percentage of female professors in faculties and universities compared to men? Are women really being underrepresented and if so, why is this?
Letterform Archive is a San Francisco nonprofit center for community and education in design and type. We recently moved and are still unpacking over 60,000 pieces of our collection. Get a sneak peek of the new space before we reopen to the public.
Uno de mis pasatiempos es buscar imprentas en mi lugar natal que aún pudiesen tener material de la imprenta tipográfica y poder registrarlo. En la búsqueda encontré una imprenta en Álamos, Sonora, México que data desde finales del s. xix el cual cuenta con una gran cantidad de material tipográfico (mobiliario, máquinas, herramientas y repertorio tipográfico) y sigue en funcionamiento a pesar de las nuevas tecnologías. Hablaré un poco de la historia de esta imprenta y presentaré imágenes del material tipográfico que he podido registrar.
Esta presentación explora en forma ecléctica los orígenes de las fuentes sanserif / This eclectic short lecture explores the origins of sanserif typefaces.
We would like to present the revival projects we made recently, involving typefaces designed by women in the early 20th century. We have also done some very brief research about their history, but most of all we would like to make this women known as the pioneers they were for women in type, while bringing to the table questions about the importance of these women and their legacy, as well as recognizing that there were women doing type that are barely known or even acknowledged.
Want some feedback on a Latin display face design you’re working on? John will be reviewing 3 or 4 designs. Sign up for a chance to be selected to participate. Space is limited. Be prepared to send us a pdf of a character set of a single style and some settings of the font in use. Use this link to sign up.
Join our guests Eugenia Roballos, Betina Naab, Carl Rohrs, Cláudio Gil, Lynne Yun, Eduardo Aire, Cara di Edwardo, Pedro (Peggo) González, and Ying Chang in a special Calligraphy Jam to wrap up TypeLab in a casual and inky fashion! Bring your questions, grab your favourite tools, and come watch and chat as they demonstrate their different skills, and tell us all about their process and favourite tools.
Schedule specifics are very much subject to change.
Register
Registration for the 2021 Typographics TypeLab is now open and free of charge.
The TypeLab for Typographics 2021 will take place online. Thanks to the continued support of our sponsors and collaborators, registration is free of charge.
Registration for the TypeLab is separate from the main conference or workshops. You must register for those events separately.
Please note: Typographics participants are subject to our Code of Conduct & Policies. If you do not agree to these conditions, do not register or attend any Typographics events.
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