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.
[...] conference, which will be held there in October. It was almost exactly a year since Eileen and I first visited Mexico City, for preliminary meetings and to look at potential venues. This time we were nailing down the [...]
[...] the phone this afternoon with Roger Black, discussing plans for next year’s ATypI conference, in Mexico City. Both St. Petersburg and Mexico City mark expansions beyond ATypI’s traditional heartland of [...]
[...] took a couple of pictures of this sign over a shop in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, in February – not because it was picturesque or folkloric but precisely because it was such an odd mix of [...]
[...] Mexico City a couple of weeks ago, when we had lunch with members of the local type community in the café of the Palacio de Bellas [...]
You might also want to consider other Mexican cities for the ATypI conference. Veracruz, Guadalajara, Mazatlan.
I’ll always love Tijuana. I grew up between San Diego and Tijuana. There is probably no stronger difference between cultures on a political boundary than the Mexican/US border.