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Letras mexicanas

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We just got back last weekend from Mexico City, where I went to meet people and research potential venues for next year’s ATypI conference. (This year’s, as noted below, will be in St. Petersburg.) Although Roger Black, who has been the key figure in making this happen and was going to meet us there, had to cancel at the last minute because of a sudden dental emergency, we met with Ricardo Salas – director of the design school at Anáhuac University, very well-known graphic designer, and the driving force behind local organizing for the event. Ricardo organized a whirlwind tour of museums and theaters in the Centro Histórico, all of which seemed promising. He knew the principals of all the venues; indeed, he seemed to know virtually everyone in the city.

It was my first visit to Mexico City. Since I absentmindedly forgot to carry my digital camera with me on the day we trooped all around the Centro, I can’t display snapshots of any of the places we visited, such as the amazing Museo de Arte Popular (folk-art museum) or San Ildefonso with its early murals by Orozco, Rivera, and other famous Mexican muralistas. I could show you photos of a bunch of friends eating, drinking, talking, and laughing in the sun, but that would be cruel to those languishing in wintry northern climes.

Type design and typography are alive and very well in Mexico, although everyone there kept telling us that this was mostly a development of the last ten or twenty years. Yet Mexico has a very long printing history; the earliest printing press in the New World was, and is, in Mexico City. And of course design, graphic and otherwise, has been an essential element of Mexican artistic life.

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