easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Last month I went to Dublin, and to Birmingham and London in the UK – so soon after returning from Typ09 in Mexico that it felt as though I was just visiting this interesting city called “Seattle” for a brief time. The main purpose of the trip was to check out venues and talk to organizers for next year’s ATypI conference in Dublin, but the timing was occasioned by my being invited to speak at the one-day Typographic Horizons conference in Birmingham (and incidentally to stay an extra day and address the Chitterlings typographers’ dinner). We flew into and out of London, so we had a chance to see a small sampling of our friends in London, too.

Typographic Horizons was a small but enthusiastic conference, bringing together some of the energy of Birmingham’s design community. Caroline Archer and Alexandre Parré, and the hosts at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, have ambitions to make Birmingham a design center. London, of course, is the metropolis, but second-city Birmingham actually finds it easier to attract people from around the country, including London, according to Caroline. And besides, it’s got three-foot-high stone statues of John Baskerville’s punches.

Dublin Castle is a remarkable venue, well set up for conferences of all kinds; and Dublin is a delightful city. We certainly enjoyed the Guinness (“the wine of the country,” as James Joyce called it) and the comfortable pubs that served it. Clare Bell and Mary Ann Bolger, the principal organizers of next year’s conference, were well organized and cheerful hosts; so were their colleagues at the Dublin Institute of Technology, which will be hosting the conference. We saw only a small bit of the city, but enough to be sure that it will be a good site for ATypI; Irish culture is so intimately tied up with literature that naturally the theme of the conference is going to be “The Word.” On the last day, before Mary Ann headed off to the picket lines for a one-day public-service strike, we managed to see the National Print Museum, which is full of presses, type, and printing artifacts of all kinds, as well as printed matter, including one of the few remaining copies of the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic.

I’ve posted a few photos from the trip on Flickr. This is just a taste; I took lots of shots of the interior spaces of Dublin Castle, but most of them will only be of interest to the organizers. You’ll see them all – the spaces, that is – when you show up next September for the conference.

Categorized as architecture, culture, events, printing |

I was too busy during Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference in Mexico City, to write anything for this blog (or for much of anything else), but it wasn’t for lack of potential content. The conference was very well attended and full of ideas; everyone I’ve talked to seemed to think that the program was particularly stimulating, and the cultural and intellectual milieu was rich and intense.

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).]

Categorized as culture, events, type designers, typography |

Time to mark one of those arbitrary points on the calendar that mean so much to us. October 21 is the 80th birthday of one of the finest American writers, Ursula K. Le Guin. Her novels have embodied a thoughtfulness, a humanity, and a pragmatic sensibility that have resonated with me since I read the earliest ones when I was just a teenager. Her essays, beginning with The Language of the Night, edited by Susan Wood, joined the most intelligent conversations in print, the ongoing weaving of ideas and their telling that humans have been engaged in since they first had time to speculate.

She’s got a great laugh, too. Happy birthday, Ursula!

[Photo: Ursula Le Guin, by Eileen Gunn]

Categorized as books, culture, events, writing & editing |

A link has just gone up on the ATypI website to a set of videos from the program of the 2007 ATypI conference in Brighton – a selection (not complete) of the talks and presentations that made that conference worth attending. (When I first started listening to one of the recordings, I found myself thinking, “Hey, that sounds like me…!” Of course, as I realized after a few moments, it was me: I did the introduction to the speaker, and that was included in the recording.) It’s a nice, timely reminder of how eclectic and informative an ATypI conference can be. It also gives me a chance (at long last) to catch one or two of the talks that I missed because I was hosting another track at the same time. That won’t be a problem this year, since the main program at Typ09 will be presented in a single continuous track. (“All singing! All dancing!” The Busby Berkeley musical numbers starring John Downer, Erik Spiekermann, and David Berlow will astound and delight!)

Time’s a-wastin’! Register now!

Categorized as education, events, typography |

Registration is now open for Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference in Mexico City (26–30 October 2009). To register, go to the ATypI Store. The sooner you do this, the cheaper it will be: there’s a very early rate, an early rate, and a regular rate, depending on how close to the conference dates you register. The very early rate is good until Sept. 11.

The conference takes place during the last week of October, which is after the end of the rainy season in central Mexico, so the weather should (with any luck) be sunny and pleasant, while the recent rains will have washed some of Mexico City’s famous pollution out of the air. The timing also makes it extraordinarily easy to stay a few extra days and experience the the uniquely Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead.

Typ09 has benefited from the enthusiastic support and involvement of the Mexican type community, and of typographers from throughout Latin America. Three full days of main-conference program, in a historic building at the heart of the city, will be followed by two days of TypeTech and hands-on workshops at the hilltop campus of Anáhuac University, near the city’s western edge. Both the lovely modern campus and Mexico City’s amazing Centro Histórico are inviting settings for a unique event.

¡Hasta la vista, en Mexico!

Categorized as culture, events, typography |

As called out recently on FontFeed, Mexican designer Isaías Loaiza Ramírez has posted on Flickr a bunch of images of Mexican typefaces in action, from the presentation first shown at TypeCon 2007 in Seattle. These images serve as an excellent fore-taste of the typographic exuberance that will be on display in Mexico City at the 2009 ATypI conference, Typ09.

Categorized as events, fonts, letters, type designers |

Last year, Gabriel Martínez Meave and his colleagues Isaías Loaiza Ramírez and Alfredo Lezama Osorio created a dramatic short video about Mexico and typography, which was first seen at ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg when Roger Black and Ricardo Salas presented the 2009 ATypI conference, Typ09, for Mexico City. This animated video is now up on YouTube, where you can see it for yourself. (Warning: contains music.)

Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference | Mexico City | October 26–30, 2009

Categorized as culture, events, letters, society, typography |

Since Thursday, I’ve been at TypeCon Rhythm in Atlanta. It’s a far cry from that first TypeCon, in a motel near an office park in Westborough, Massachusetts. Although this year’s TypeCon is noticeably smaller than in recent years (everyone’s feeling the economic pinch), it’s been lively. And the weather hasn’t been as brutal as you might expect in Georgia in July.

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.]

Categorized as events, type designers |

The first type conference I ever attended was Type90, the 1990 ATypI conference in Oxford, England. It was also the first ATypI event that was truly a conference, widely publicized, rather than a “congress” of insiders. Type90 was the brainchild of Roger Black, who even then was a well-known editorial designer and had just co-founded the Font Bureau. This year’s ATypI conference, the first one in Mexico City, is also Roger’s brainchild, which is one of the reason’s he pushed to have it called “Typ09,” as a sort of allusion to or inversion of Type90.

At Type90, I was a newcomer; I knew only a couple of people there, though I knew a few others by reputation. Several of us relative newcomers ended up hanging out together during the weekend; a number of friendships began there.

Not too long ago Thom Feild unearthed a photo from Type90, showing a bunch of us in a pub on the final day of the conference. Recognize anyone?

[Photo (counterclockwise from lower left): Phil Baines (London), Tom Bee (Edinburgh), Susan Skarsgard (Ann Arbor), me (Seattle), Iskra Johnson (Seattle), Thom Feild (Seattle), random local at the table behind us (Oxford, presumably), and April from Apple (Cupertino; sorry, neither Thom nor I can remember her last name). Photo copyright by Thom Feild. Slightly larger version here.]

Categorized as events, typography |

ATypI has just issued the “Call for Presentations” for this year’s conference in Mexico City, Typ09. We have also posted some preliminary information about the conference on the ATypI website, and we will have hotel and travel information there shortly.

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.

Categorized as design, events, type designers, typography |