The Board had been considering future venues for the conference, and one of the countries considered was Mexico. It would be a very different direction for ATypI: our first conference in Latin America. Roger Black, whose design studio Danilo Black had offices in both New York and Monterrey, had been suggesting the idea of a Mexican ATypI for several years. But nothing concrete had yet been done.
I was President of the association, and it seemed to me like a good idea. But it would take a lot of work. At the 2007 TypeCon in Seattle, which both Roger and I were attending, I walked with him one day as he was headed off to lunch at a nearby hotel. On that short walk, I put it to him: would he take responsibity for making a Mexican conference happen? He would. He then invited me to join his group for lunch, but I had another meeting back at the conference hotel. But we had a commitment: ATypI would go to Mexico in 2009.
Roger’s first idea had been to hold the conference in Monterrey, but it quickly became clear that the obvious location was the national capital, Mexico City. Through his long-time friend Abel Quezada Rueda, a well-known Mexican artist whose father, Abel Quesada, had been a famous cartoonist, Roger got in touch with Ricardo Salas Moreno. Ricardo was a highly successful graphic designer; among other things had designed the visual identity for one of Mexico’s presidents. He was also the Director of the School of Design at the University of Anáhuac in the hills of Mexico City. Ricardo Salas was an ideal local organizer for the conference.
Roger dubbed the conference Typ09, in an allusion to Type 90, which he had organized in Oxford nineteen years before. In English the name reversal was obvious: “type ninety”/“type-oh-nine.” But in Spanish, at least in Mexican Spanish, it wasn’t common to say “oh” for zero, so a bit of the parallel was lost: it became “tip zero nueve.” Whatever the name, it inspired a brilliant logo from Gabriel Martínez Meave, and an excellent graphic identity from Ricardo. Gabriel and two collaborators even put together a dramatic animated video introducing Mexico typography and culture to promote the conference.
As the current President, I accompanied Roger and ATypI executive director Barbara Jarzyna on two planning trips to Mexico City, one the year before and one early in 2009. The main purpose of the first visit was to meet the local team and to investigate potential sites for the conference.
The most spectacular possible venue was the grand Palacio de Bellas Artes, with its dual architectural identity: Beaux Arts on the outside, Art Deco on the inside. (Construction had been interrupted for several years by the Mexican Revolution.) This would have been a wonderful location for the conference, but the Palacio was due for renovation in time for the bicentennial celebrations of Mexican independence in 2010. Although the work was expected to be completed before our conference date, we decided that it would be wiser to find another venue.
Ricardo took us on a tour of many of the artistic institutions and museums in the Centro Histórico, checking them out as potential conference venues. Many of them (including the Palacio de Bellas Artes) had murals painted by the most famous artists of the 20th-century Mexican mural tradition; all of them featured historic architecture. The most impressive artistically was perhaps the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, in which Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siquieros had all painted murals in the 1920s. (One of them was Rivera’s very first mural.) It was clear to us that Ricardo was very well connected: it seemed as though several times, when we walked into a museum or cultural center, the director would come out, smiling and calling, “¡Hola, Ricardo!”
The planning process also involved meetings with potential supporters, including a meeting with the director of Conaculta, the National Council for Culture and the Arts, whose mission was described as “stimulating and encouraging both artistic and cultural creation.” The director was enthusiastic about our project, and we were confident that we would have government financial support.
The eventual choice of venue was the Museo Interactivo de Economía (MIDE, the Interactive Museum of Economics), which was housed in a former Bethlehemite convent right in the heart of the historic center of the city. A unique feature of the museum was its square central covered courtyard, lined on all sides with columned porticoes, with a disused fountain in the center. The modern museum used a sophisticated projection system to show video presentations on all four walls: a surrounding visual experience. With a platform over the fountain base to make a central stage, we could have our speakers’ presentations displayed all around them.
Typ09 was more than just a type conference; it was a celebration of the visual artistic culture of Mexico and Latin America. Although the distances were great, the conference drew attendees not just from Mexico (and of course the United States and Europe) but from countries as far as Brazil and Argentina. One of the many themes pursued in the talks was indigenous languages and their representation in writing systems.
The conference was broken into two parts: the main program over three days at MIDE, followed by two days of educational forums, workshops, and TypeTech at the University of Anáhuac. Mexico City is famous for its traffic jams, and the excellent Metro system does not extend out that far; any attempt to ferry attendees back and forth during the day would have been doomed to frustration and failure. So for three days everything was concentrated in the Centro Histórico, after which the attendees were bused to the hilly Anáhuac campus for the final two days. (Most often at an ATypI conference, the education and workshop days will be scheduled before the main conference; in this case, they were scheduled after.)
The conference took place near the end of October, which put it just before the annual celebration of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). The city was awash in colorful marigolds, the traditional flowers of remembrance. The weather was sunny and warm, and the famous pollution was barely evident; more noticeable for visitors was Mexico City’s high elevation (2,240 meters/7,350 feet). The Anáhuac campus was even higher.
During the main conference, in the Centro Histórico, lunches for speakers and attendees were served at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central plaza. As intended, this gave everyone a chance to mingle and talk, whether to old friends and colleagues or to students and newcomers, encouraging ATypI’s identity as an open gathering of the typographic community.
The program featured a very wide variety of presentations about the history and current state of typography, publishing, and type design in the Americas, supplemented with exhibits and workshops in various venues within the Centro Histórico. It also had its tense moments, such as when one North American type designer leapt up to verbally attack another as he was delivering his talk. (The speaker ignored the interruption. The audience were puzzled.)
One of the singular developments that came out of Typ09 was the establishment of a common standard for web fonts, the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). This had been debated for several years, the problem being how to balance the goal of making fonts available for web use in a consistent and reliable format with the desire of type designers and distributors to restrict copying and unlicensed distribution of their fonts. At a “web fonts” panel that included representatives of many of the companies with an interest in the industry, the participants announced that they had all agreed to support the WOFF format. This announcement, and the subsequent practical support in all the major web platforms, broke the logjam, setting the stage for greatly increased potential for the quality of web typography.
The end of the main conference was celebrated with a dinner at the Salón Los Angeles, a famous social club and dance hall founded in the 1930s. Its Art Deco decor and historical music and dance posters set the stage for an event quite different from the traditional “gala dinner.” After eating, the attendees were invited to learn salsa dancing, and the evening got very energized and kinetic. Carol Wahler, executive director of the Type Directors Club, who had been to many years of ATypI conferences, declared that this was “the best gala dinner ATypI has ever had.”
The various exhibitions were displayed at the Anáhuac campus. These ranged from poster exhibits to a special display of historic Mexican printing, on loan from the Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Puebla, with printed books from as far back as the 17th century.
Typ09 was extremely well attended, with large numbers of students from the huge National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and elsewhere. Its cultural effect was enormous. But financially the conference lost money. A combination of worldwide economic recession and the swine flu epidemic meant that the Mexican economy was in collapse, and that affected ATypI’s sponsorship severely. There was no money forthcoming from Conaculta, and even Roger Black’s partner Eduardo Danilo had to decline being a sponsor that year.