easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Two weeks ago I got back from the 2025 ATypI conference in Copenhagen. This was the first time ATypI had gone to Copenhagen since the 2001 conference – which took place just two weeks after 9/11. As you can imagine, being an American in Denmark in those two years had quite different resonances. In 2001, before George W. Bush turned an atrocious crime into a misguided war, the reaction of people abroad was aghast sympathy. This year, the people I spoke with in Copenhagen mostly offered wry commiseration, along with lots of questions. (There was one Persian taxi driver who had a good knowledge of U.S. politics and with whom I had a fascinating conversation on the way from hotel to conference venue.)

The conference was held at the Royal Danish Academy (Det Kongelige Akademi – Arkitektur, Design, Konservering), in buildings that had once housed part of the Danish Navy. The lead local organizer was Sophie Beier, who teaches at the Academy and heads up its Centre for Visibility Design (and has spoken many times at previous ATypI conferences about legibility and readability). This year there were two tracks of programming, in two separate spaces in the same building – the same building, but you had to go outside to get from one to the other. As at most events like this, you finally figure out how to get around and how to find all the places you need to be just before the event ends – and that hard-won information is stuck in your memory with no possible future use. I can say that if you got dropped off at the Academy’s address by a taxi or Uber, it would take you a while to find the entrance to the conference. But people at the Academy were quite willing to direct you.

One thing that had struck me when I first looked at the program and the list of speakers was that most of the names were not familiar to me. That could be disconcerting but was mostly encouraging; it means that the Association is not mired in old habits but open to new people and new ideas. Indeed, a large number of the talks were unrelated to traditional European typography and type design; there were even, on the last day, two different talks about aspects of Chinese type scheduled opposite each other. (Okay, that might be excessive; I would have liked to listen to both.) I am not a fan of multiple tracks of programming, since you always have to choose one or the other, but the organizers this year were very good at keeping the two schedules coordinated and giving people ample time to move between the two tracks at will.

And what did people talk about? Oh, you know, the usual: type, typography, reading, publishing, various scripts, technical underpinnings of typesetting and type design. Just to give you an idea of the range, here are the first two talks, which were on opposite each other on Wednesday morning: “Knud V. Engelhardt, a Danish Typographic Pioneer” and “Streamlining and Flexible Traditional Chinese Type Design with Open-Source Character Set.”

There were several talks on fonts for African languages, and a panel discussion of designing for the Arabic script in different countries, Arab and non-Arab. Niteesh Yadav’s talk on “Typography as a Living Medium,” about adapting text for use in Augmented and Virtual Reality, particularly caught my attention: what he said seemed like a logical extension of the concerns I’ve been involved with for several years for readable typography for the screen. (I asked Niteesh to write something for the Scripta Typographic Institute site, which I’ve let languish for far too long. The conversation could use a refresh.)

It’s never possible to see everything and talk to everybody. In the interests of my ATypI history project, I had lunch with the organizers of the previous Copenhagen conference, Henrik Birkvig and Torben Wilhelmsen, and quizzed them for their memories, with my trusty voice-recording phone turned on. A number of people offered new information about past conferences, some from personal memory and some from knowledge of older documentation. (I’m working on the chapter about the 1960s now, and it’s going to be a work in progress, as I try to fill in the holes in the fossil record.) On the first days, when the weather was unwelcoming, the only place to foregather easily was the relatively small hallway outside the main auditorium with its excellent coffee bar; but when the weather improved and the sun came out, people would spill out onto the grass, which was also where various demonstrations were set up under a tent. Apart from the coffee bar and a cafeteria, the options for meals required a bit of a walk, but there were some water-side restaurants and a popular outdoor food court not far away.

The Poles managed the conference’s infrastructure brilliantly. The Finns and Brazilians got me into late-night trouble with unending parties. The Chinese got us all talking about hanzi. The Danes, of course, welcomed us to their country and their typographic traditions. I enjoyed both social and intellectual interaction with people from Australia, Britain, Germany, India, Lebanon, Poland, the Netherlands, Argentina, Portugal, Austria, and even the USA. That’s one of the pleasures and also the values of an ATypI conference.

[Above: attendees at the official reception in Copenhagen’s ornate City Hall; the building at the Royal Danish Academy where the ATypI program took place; Taurai Valerie Mtake on “The future is ancestral.”]

Categorized as events, people, type history, typography |

When I started working on a history of ATypI in 2018, before the Covid-19 pandemic, it was a project that I expected would take two or three years and would produce a series of small booklets, one on each topic or period in the association’s 70-year history. With backing from the Board, I researched and wrote a first chapter, outlining ATypI’s “origin story,” and published a draft of that chapter on Medium. At the 2019 conference in Tokyo, I gave a talk about the project and my progress thus far.

But then the pandemic hit, shutting so many things down, including both in-person ATypI conferences and the backing for the ATypI history project. I’ve been wanting to get back to it ever since, but I’m in no position to take it on as a purely volunteer project, and after the financial hit of the pandemic years, the Board isn’t able to back it at this time.

So I’ve launched a GoFundMe campaign for the ATypI history project.

This is not, of course, meant to compete with any direct financial of ATypI; it’s a separate, complementary endeavor. If I can raise the money, I hope to complete the project over the course of the next year, and ideally present it in a published form in time for the 2026 ATypI conference, wherever that may be. I’m not foolish enough to make any guarantees, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

Researching this has been fascinating. I started out digging into the association’s beginnings, when it was initially proposed by Charles Peignot in 1955, and its formal kickoff in 1957 in Lausanne. I’ve read through archives at the University of Reading and the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris, and I’ve interviewed a number of the early members. (Not all of them, of course, are still with us.) There is both formal material (proposals, resolutions, minutes of meetings) and anecdotal accounts (“Do you think you have to be a nasty person to be a good type designer?”). So far I’ve focused on events that were before my time; after Type90, which was my first type conference, and especially after I joined the ATypI board in 2000, I have first-hand recollections and documentation.

Why is the history of ATypI important? Because there has been no other organization that so thoroughly embodied the typographic community and the business and technology of type and type design. And because ATypI’s initial goal – protection of the rights of type designers – has proven so elusive over the years.

In lieu of a handy billionaire or Medici prince, I hope to cobble together enough funding through this GoFundMe to enable me to complete the project.

[Images: covers of two ATypI publications from the 1960s (500 years of Czech printing, and Type in our time).

Categorized as culture, education, events, type history, typography, writing & editing |

After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve come back to my sporadic typographic memoir, this time to talk about the years in the 1990s when I was the house designer for Copper Canyon Press. In that time, I designed not only the books but all the collateral material as well, trying to keep a consistent feel to everything that came out of the press while maintaining a variety of approaches to individual books.

This chapter is posted on Medium, as are all the previous chapters of the ongoing memoir project.

I still have all the files I created in producing those books, but I was working on a Mac before Apple adopted OS X, which fundamentally changed the file formats of the entire operating system. Unfortunately for future compatibility, all of those old files, none of which had filename extensions, now show up in the modern MacOS as “Unix executable files,” for lack of any other identification. Of course, the file information is still there; add the proper extension and the file type becomes recognizable. Whether it becomes openable, after something like a quarter century, is another question. But there are old Macs and old OSes and old versions of PageMaker. Somewhere.

In a few cases, I did create PDFs of my designs, either book covers or collateral like brochures. But any instances of Minion Multiple Master, the most advanced type technology of the time, which I used a lot, got lost in translation; current Adobe Acrobat technology doesn’t recognize the old MM fonts.

Such a waste of a brilliant technology! Such a short-sighted abandonment of sophisticated design. (Don’t get me started.)

Of course, with today’s variable fonts technology, you can get many of the same effects – and more. I just hope this tech doesn’t get left by the side of the information highway the way multiple-master formats did.

Really, isn’t the point to not lose information as techology advances? Including typographic and graphic-design technology. Our books need to be still readable in 500 years; or five years.

Categorized as book design, books, design, fonts, publishing, type history, typography |

I would like to direct your attention to a typographic element that is often ignored. Allow me to point out what makes it unique.

That element? The manicule. It’s also known as a fist, a hand, and by many other names, but it always takes the same basic form: a small image of a human hand, with the index finger pointing (usually to the right). Manicules date back to at least the Middle Ages, when it was quite common for readers to annotate their books, drawing a little hand in the margin to point out a particularly important or noteworthy passage. (“Manicule” comes from the Latin word for “little hand.”) Today they’re more likely to be part of a font, and to be used typographically, whether very large in a supermarket ad or at small size as an indicator of importance in a system of typographic hierarchy. They are often given a bright color to make them stand out. (Red is the traditional second color.)

Manicules can take the style of the font they’re in, just like ampersands or currency symbols. And now, the Dutch/Finnish type studio Underware, whose typefaces range from one of my favorite book faces, Dolly, to the truly bonkers stencil typeface Plakato, has issued a small booklet they call a “Manicule specimen,” demonstrating their versatility at imagining new forms of manicules for every occasion.

This little limited-edition book has a short text running through it, changing typeface twice per page, facing enlarged manicules in the same typeface, two per page. It’s a tour-de-force in its own highly specific way. And it serves to remind us that we have manicules at our fingertips, in many digital fonts, and that sometimes it’s appropriate to use them.

[Image: page spread from Underware’s Manicule specimen.]

[Originally published on February 8, 2022, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as books, culture, fonts, type history, typography |

Christopher Burke, Gerard Unger: Life in Letters (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij de Buitenkant, 2021).

Christopher Burke writes clearly and knowledgeably about type and the people who design it. His just-published biography of Dutch type designer Gerard Unger, one of the most prolific and talented type designers of the later 20th century and the early 21st, is quite simply a must-have book. It’s well made, effectively designed, artfully written, and lavishly illustrated.

Gerard Unger: Life in Letters is above all a book about process. In tracing Unger’s life and career, Burke shows Unger repeatedly wrestling with new techniques and new technologies, figuring out how to take advantage of them and finding creative ways to put even their constraints to use. Unger did not begin by cutting metal punches, but he came into the field of typography when it was adapting to phototypesetting, and he then encountered each new iteration of digital typesetting and type design. The book’s ample and detailed illustrations show these processes in abundance.

Unger was a pragmatic designer, always focused on making type that people could actually read. Whether designing signage faces for highways or metros, or text faces for daily newspapers, he studied what made the letters readable and incorporated his insights into each design. The distinctive curve forms of his letters were unique to him, often making it easy to spot an Unger typeface when you saw it. He incorporated history but always created something new; his last major typeface, Alverata, with its sanserif companion Sanserata, is both a usable text face and an exuberant expression of letter forms that first blossomed in Romanesque lettering a thousand years ago.

[Originally published on October 1, 2021, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as books, people, type designers, type history, typography |

At the beginning of 2020’s online virtual TypeLab, Petr van Blokland was telling the story of how TypeLab started in the early ’90s.

He described it as “a rogue version of ATypI,” which he and a few collaborators (among them Gerrit Noordzij, David Berlow, Erik van Blokland, and other ATypI designers) put together for the 1993 conference in Antwerp. It grew out of the experience in Budapest a year earlier, when the various international delegates who didn’t speak Hungarian found themselves milling around outside during a lecture on Hungarian type that was being delivered in Hungarian (naturally) without translation (unfortunately). It became apparent, Petr said, that there might be value in providing something else for people to do when they didn’t want to spend all their time in the official program. (In those days, ATypI conferences were fairly small, and they had only a single track of programming.)

After Budapest, Petr suggested to the ATypI Board of Directors that they plan some kind of informal alternative for the Antwerp conference, but the Board wasn’t willing to do that. So Petr and his friends set up their own alternative, which they dubbed TypeLab.

This was a time when digital typography was still thought of as new; it was only three years since Zuzana Licko had épaté la typoisie at Type90 with her HyperCard-based, music-enhanced presentation on fonts for the screen. Very little content about digital type had made its way into ATypI’s main program so far, and what had been included was largely theoretical. TypeLab was meant to be a sort of hands-on side-conference, an experimental laboratory, with a room full of equipment where anybody could try out the new technologies.

They managed to secure sponsorship from Agfa, which made it possible to have the computers, software, and printers all freely available.

“The room of 15 x 15 meters,” says Petr, “was divided into four quarters: a little lecture theatre of 40 chairs, a design studio with Macs and software, a ‘lounge’ where people could sit, talk, and show their sketches and drawings (note that there wasn’t anything like phones or laptops back then), and a printing department (loaded with printers, a typesetter, and copying machines).

“The board of ATypI didn’t go for the idea, so we planned to rent a space on the other side of the street. In the summer of 1993 Agfa, the main sponsor of ATypI that year in Antwerp, got wind of the idea, so Petr got invited to the Antwerp headquarters in late July. The appointment was made with the chairman of the board of Agfa, and also present was the then chairman of ATypI, who still didn’t want TypeLab to happen. But Agfa left ATypI no choice and promised the intended lunch space to TypeLab, also allowing a wish list for equipment.”

Over the course of the conference, they made their own magazine for the delegates, conceived and printed on the fly, using fonts that had been created right there just the day before. “The A3 printed newspapers, ready at breakfast for the attendees, were indeed made with the type that was created the day before. Many traditional/regular ATypI participants thought that to be impossible. Making type was something costing years, not days.”

Petr recalls a student at the Antwerp conference telling him how Adrian Frutiger had wandered into the lab, and the student had shown him how Fontographer worked – a technology that Frutiger was completely unfamiliar with at the time.

That was the first of six TypeLabs, Petr said, the last one being held at the 1996 conference in The Hague. By that time, Petr himself was on the ATypI Board, and from then on, the essence of TypeLab got incorporated into the regular conference program. It was no longer necessary as a guerrilla alternative; it had arrived.

Five years ago, TypeLab got revived as an adjunct to the Typographics conferences that were getting started at Cooper Union in New York. Organizer Cara di Edwardo had suggested that there ought to be some sort of program on the side during the main conference, so Petr re-created TypeLab for the occasion. It has been a Typographics fixture ever since, and this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, TypeLab became an online-only, virtual event (“a 72-hour marathon,” says Petr), with participants and audience from around the world.

[Image: big blue TypeLab-branded folder for conference materials, from ATypI 1993 in Antwerp.]

Categorized as events, people, tech, type designers, type history, typography |

I have continued my memoir of falling into phototypesetting and working in a small print shop in Seattle in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Franklin Press moved from Capitol Hill to Pioneer Square within a month of my starting there. Being in the heart of the city, and in the heart of Seattle’s pre-grunge alternative culture, I felt intimately connected with the life of the city. And I was learning a craft I had never suspected that I would take up.

Categorized as culture, people, type history, writing & editing |

More history, this time my own. As I worked on researching the first part of a history of ATypI, I came to realize that I myself had been around long enough that my recollections formed part of typographic history. So I’ve started writing down my memories of how I got involved with typography – a sort of typographic memoir. I came to type sideways, like everything else in my so-called career. I’ve just posted a draft of the first bit on Medium. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

Categorized as people, type history, typography, writing & editing |