Many thanks to the organizers of the conference – especially to Ricardo Salas, the mastermind of the whole event; to the indispensible Mónica Puigferrat and Paulina Rocha; to Marina Garone and Leonardo Vásquez, of the program and exhibitions committees, respectively; to Roger Black, who got the ball rolling; and to Barbara Jarzyna, ATypI’s conference organizer and executive director.

Although I didn’t have time to write anything, I did take a lot of photos. I posted an early batch to Flickr before the conference began, and later added quite a few more. Most of them even have captions! Here they are.

[Photos: Typ09 banner and posters at Anáhuac University (left); Mark Barratt & Simon Daniels at a sidewalk bar in the Centro Histórico (below, top, L–R); one of the multiple screens in the main program at MIDE (below, bottom).]

Verdana was designed in the 1990s for Microsoft, developed specifically as a typeface for reading onscreen. The designer, Matthew Carter, has long experience of virtually every kind of typeface technology, and he brought that to bear on designing Verdana. Since text on a computer screen appears, of necessity, at pretty coarse resolution, the outlines of the letters have to be adapted somehow when rendering them at small sizes; there simply aren’t enough pixels available to reproduce the outline shapes perfectly. That’s where the art and craft of designing screen fonts comes in: making the most of those extreme limitations. In what was at the time a revolutionary turnabout, Carter first designed bitmapped letters for each of the target sizes, positioning pixels to get the most legible shapes he could; then he drew the outlines for the higher-resolution letters, based on the shapes of the lo-res bitmaps. Tom Rickner, a wizard of digital font technology, then created the “hints” that would tell the font software exactly how to distort the outlines at a particular size, when drawing a character on the screen, in order to achieve the ideal bitmap at that size.

One of the things that make Verdana legible onscreen, compared with a lot of other typefaces, is the generous space around the characters. There’s always a tendency among web designers to try to cram in as much material as possible in the space available, but that works against clarity and legibility. Without enough space between the letters, they all tend to run together. We’ve all seen this, much too frequently, on our computer screens. The clear, open shapes of Verdana’s letters can vary quite a bit from size to size at small text sizes onscreen, but one thing they have in common is that they’ve been given enough space to breathe.

Although Verdana was meant primarily for onscreen reading, it works surprisingly well on paper as well. It’s a simple, clean, unpretentious sans serif typeface, easy to read. I’ve used it for years as the typeface for manuscripts and drafts of anything I’m writing, because it’s easy to read both onscreen and on paper and it gets out of the way. I realized seven or eight years ago that Verdana had passed into general use, when I saw it on a billboard in San Francisco. (The same characteristics that make it legible onscreen may make it easy to read at a distance as you’re driving by.) I’ve never tried using Verdana in print, but I can imagine situations where I might want to.

It’s funny to see the choice of Verdana lambasted because it was designed for a different purpose. As Erik Spiekermann has pointed out, many of our most versatile typefaces were originally designed for one specific purpose, answering a particular set of constraints (Times New Roman, for instance, which was designed for the presses that printed The Times in 1931). Even Bell Centennial and Bell Gothic, both of which were designed for the listings in American telephone books, have been used successfully at huge display sizes by editorial designers with an eye for the unusual. Perhaps Verdana has unexpected uses as well.

I have no strong opinion about Ikea’s redesign. Certainly Verdana’s numerals are very clear and readable – even stylish, in a chunky, sturdy sort of way – and the numerals are what end up at the largest size on the pages of an Ikea catalog. And I alway felt that the Ikea version of Futura was a little too tightly spaced, though that’s not the fault of the typeface but of how it’s used.

One of the reasons Ikea chose Verdana is that it works across quite a lot of languages and scripts. The basic fonts include Greek and Cyrillic alongside the extended Latin alphabet; and Microsoft’s Japanese typeface Meiryo is based on Verdana, with the romaji (Latin letters) being essentially slightly revised and sharpened versions of Verdana’s designs. (As near as I can tell, from Ikea’s Japanese web pages, the Japanese catalog does use Meiryo, although with a different typeface for some text.)

Verdana may be about to become more versatile for both web and print use, since Ascender Corporation just announced that they are working with Matthew Carter and the Font Bureau to extend both the Verdana and the Georgia families with new weights and widths.

Whatever the merits of the case, what strikes me most forcefully in all of this is that a debate about which font to use could even be noticed, much less become a cause célèbre in the public consciousness. What typographic times we live in!

[Images: two details from Ikea's U.S. website (top and middle); sample of some of the forthcoming new members of the Verdana and Georgia families.]

The program has been varied and mostly engaging. Gerard Unger was here to receive the 2009 SOTA Typography Award – richly deserved, and greeted with a standing ovation. As always, he has been friendly and approachable. I missed the Type Crit, when he, Matthew Carter, Akira Kobayashi, and John Downer offered their critiques and commentary on typeface designs that were submitted to them, but it’s always a high point, even for those who aren’t type designers. Bruno Maag did a heartfelt rant on the importance of non-Latin type design (and the wide-open markets for new non-Latin typefaces). Shelley Gruendler told the story of Type Camp, the hands-on learning experience that she started in frustration at the teaching of type in Vancouver and that she is now taking around the world. Rick Anwyl gave a somewhat scattershot but moving account of the origins and the saving of the CBS typographic wall, the “gastrotypographicalassemblage” created by Lou Dorfsman and Herb Lubalin, which once graced the wall of the employee cafeteria at CBS headquarters in New York and is now being slowly restored at Atlanta’s Center for Design Study. Zeena Feldman spoke provocatively about the idea of how visual design contributes to the sense of a globalized “non-place” wherever you go. Heather Shaw gave an intriguing account of how she had taught web typography by having students figure out how to reproduce classic layouts of the New Typography using HTML and CSS, thus connecting contemporary technology with the revolutionary typography of eighty years ago.

It goes on tomorrow, kicking off with a two-hour panel on the hot topic of web fonts – how you can give web designers a way to use real typefaces without either turning them into graphic images or giving away digital fonts to everyone who views a web page.

TypeCon is one of the two major typographic events of the year (the other being ATypI). Both of them share at least one characteristic: no matter how stimulating the program may be, the heart of it all is the social and personal interactions, among old friends, current colleagues, and new acquaintances – who may in turn become old friends in future years. And sometimes you go off on a tangent: on Friday night, I ended up accompanying Paul Shaw and Frank Wildenberg to an Atlanta Braves baseball game (my first live baseball game in thirty years). It was a way to get a little sense of Atlanta beyond the vicinity of the conference hotel. (And, as it turned out, to see some fireworks.)

Next year’s TypeCon will be in Los Angeles. It’ll be worth being there.

[Photos: Hatch Show Print posters after Jim Sherradan's keynote talk; opening slide at the presentation of the SOTA Typography Award to Gerard Unger; and two sculptures by June Corley made out of physical letters, from a gallery exhibit at the Grand Hyatt. More photographs here.]

This year, the main program will be a bit different from usual. Instead of two or more tracks of simultaneous program items, all timed to a uniform length, we’ll have a single continuous track, with varying lengths depending on what seems appropriate for each item. This will take some virtuoso juggling of the proposals and the final schedule, but it’s Roger Black’s idea that this will enliven the proceedings and give everyone who attends a more cohesive experience. I’m looking forward to it.

The continuous three-day main program downtown will be followed by an intensive two days of workshops, including the now-traditional TypeTech but also several other workshop tracks, at Anáhuac University.

Every few years, ATypI needs to shake up its programming a bit. I was just looking at some issues of the TypeLab daily newsletter from the Antwerp conference in 1993, with emotional denunciations of the moribund state of ATypI programming and calls for livening it up through the fresh young blood brought in by TypeLab. (It worked.) Maybe now it’s time for another experiment in refreshing the mix.

Comic Sans is one of those typefaces, like ITC Souvenir, that’s too successful for its own good. It’s curved and “friendly” in a way that irritates typophiles but appeals to everyday users. And it’s on everyone’s machine, so it’s available to be misused in every way conceivable.

Thanks to Cynthia Batty for pointing me (and the ATypI members’ list) to this brief video of Vinnie’s talk at the ROFLThing conference in New York. The type designer is not responsible for how the typeface gets used. You create a tool and let it loose on the world; sometimes it’s used the way you thought it would be, other times it’s turned to uses you never conceived of.

But I confess that I have this errant fantasy of the ultimate inappropriate typeface: Comic Sans Blackletter!

Since the Microsoft Typography team, along with the rest of Windows International, was moving to a new building on the Microsoft corporate campus over the weekend of December 12, it seemed only appropriate to make a visible statement about the importance and ubiquity of type in the visual environment. Through the use of six-inch-square pixels cut out of sticky-backed black vinyl (a technique used previously for an installation at the Design Commission during TypeCon Seattle), these large-scale representations of bitmap characters from the Verdana and Georgia type families appeared without warning on the walls of the new building. This was reportedly achieved without a single X-acto-based industrial accident.

Verdana and Georgia were originally commissioned by Microsoft for onscreen reading of text. The way they were designed was the opposite of the usual process of designing type for the screen. Instead of creating outlines and then hinting the outlines (giving them rules to follow when turning into bitmaps at small sizes), type designer Matthew Carter started by designing the bitmaps – the end result that he wanted to see at each size – and then worked with hinting wizard Tom Rickner to create outlines and hinting that would achieve those shapes. The letters of the wordlet “typo” on the wall of Building 9 are taken from the bitmaps of 10pt Verdana and Georgia (in a mix of styles) at 96dpi. (Can you identify which letters are from which font, and in which style?)

The first versions of Verdana and Georgia were released in 1996; they now represent an early stage in the development of digital type at Microsoft. What will it look like when the MST commandos attempt to represent grayscale hinting and ClearType subpixel rendering at wall-size scale?