ATypI in the 2010s and beyond

Dublin 2010

When ATypI’s annual conference returned to Europe in 2010, it landed in Dublin, home of a long intellectual, literary, and typographic tradition. The organizers, Clare Bell and Mary Ann Bolger, taught at the School of Art and Design of the Dublin Institute of Technology, which is where the first two days of workshops (“PreFace”) were held. The main program took place in Dublin Castle, the Georgian edifice that had once housed the British colonial government of Ireland, which was well set up for international conferences. Its grounds also included the remarkable Chester Beatty Library.

Notable events included a reception with demonstrations at the National Print Museum, a celebration of 20 years of the Dutch Type Library, and the gala dinner at the Guinness Storehouse. The opening reception at Dublin Castle followed the keynote address by Robert Bringhurst.

James Mosley spoke on the original typography of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Before the conference, he had expressed diffidence about an English scholar speaking, in Ireland, about such an iconic Irish document. The Proclamation is of enormous political and emotional importance in the Republic of Ireland, but the original hand-printed and hand-typeset document, printed clandestinely on April 23, 1916, has been reprinted, re-typeset, and imitated so many times that the popular versions often lack typographical fidelity to the original. The organizers assured him that his talk would be welcome. Mosley retraced the history of the original and its facsimiles, showing how the first version was typeset and exactly how it appeared.

Rejkjavík 2011

Rejkjavík was the first ATypI conference to devote an entire day to writing systems and scripts beyond the Latin alphabet. We heard about the typography of Indic, Korean, Arabic, Mongolian, Chinese, and Khmer scripts, not to mention Danish, Irish, German, and Turkish letters within the Latin alphabet. This was a milestone in the expansion of ATypI’s scope beyond its European heartland.

The conference was held at the newly opened Harpa, a striking concert hall and conference center right on the waterfront in Rejkjavík harbor. Its irregular geometry and fishnet-over-glass windows were designed by Icelandic-Danish architect Ólafur Eliasson. The first concert at Harpa had taken place just a few months earlier.

Local organizers were Gunnar Vilhjálmsson and Hörður Lárusson.

The conference opened with a welcome from the President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, and it was a change from the usual official welcome because he actually spoke knowledgeably about typography. He gave a twenty-minute talk about the Icelandic language and its typography – an intelligent, eloquent commentary that set a high standard and neatly prefaced the keynote speaker, Gunnlaugur SE Briem. Briem spoke wittily about type, letters, and language. Together, they kicked off the main conference.

In his welcome, President Grímsson told us that he was particularly proud of having gotten the unique Icelandic characters (eth, Þ; and thorn, ð) into the Unicode encoding system ahead of the unique characters needed for the much more widely spoken Turkish. In fact, the conference took its theme and its visual identity from the Þ.

The Board had hoped that Rejkjavík, being in the mid-Atlantic, would prove easily accessible for attendees from both North America and Europe, but in fact the attendance was relatively small. It was nonetheless a very lively conference, with enthusiastic responses from those who attended.

Letter.2

Ten years after the bukva:raz! type-design competition, José Scaglione organized ATypI’s second international competition, Letter.2.

The call for entries stated:

Letter.2 aims to provide a wide-angled snapshot of the state of typeface design around the globe ten years after their first competition in 2001, and to promote typographic excellence and best professional practices. It also intends to raise awareness about the role of typography in encouraging and maintaining cultural diversity.

The judging took place in Buenos Aires, and 53 winning entries were selected. There was no ambitious book produced to showcase the winners, but they were exhibited at the next year’s conference in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong 2012

In 2012 ATypI went to Asia for the first time, with a conference in Hong Kong, at the School of Design of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The theme was “墨 [mò] – between black and white,” referring not only to the ink in Chinese calligraphy but to intellectual pursuits in general.

The local organizer was Keith Tam of the Polytechnic’s School of Design; the School co-organized the conference with CAFA (Chinese Academy of Fine Arts) in Beijing.

The program featured not one but five keynote speakers, reflecting different aspects of international typography and design: Katsumi Asaba (Japan), Henry Steiner (Hong Kong), Min Wang (Beijing), Fiona Ross (U.K.), and Sammy Or (Hong Kong).

Not surprisingly, the conference drew attendees from all over East Asia, as well as many from Europe and North America and other parts of the world. But the emphasis was clearly on Chinese typography and type design, which has challenges that producing fonts for the Latin alphabet doesn’t have. And since Japanese and Korean fonts regularly include Chinese characters as well as their specific national scripts, any CJK font requires an enormous number of characters – and often alternate glyphs to suit national preferences.

Paul Luna opened an exhibition called “From hot-metal to OpenType – the type design process for world scripts,” which was curated by Fiona Ross and Vaibhav Singh from the extensive collection at the University of Reading. They had selected documents and artefacts to tell the story of type production across technologies in Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai.

One of the most popular workshops was “Zi Wut: Chinese-English Bilingual Letterpress Demo Workshop,” offsite at a tiny letterpress shop in Kowloon.

Amsterdam 2013

The year after Hong Kong, ATypI returned to its European roots, holding the 2013 conference in Amsterdam. The theme was “Point Counter Point,” with a program organized by Marina Chaccur and Eben Sorkin. The theme was a reference to “that early form of musical polyphony in which muiltiple melodies combine to build a composition.” This was taken literally in a Friday-evening concert at the Hotel Krasnapolsky that featured mostly Bach played on violin and harpsichord.

Petr van Blokland was the keynote speaker, presenting “a visual map of the profession of graphic design, and typography and type design in particular.” He looked to the future, notably “detailing the tools that aren’t available and the techniques that won’t be there.”

The Prix Charles Peignot was awarded to Russian type designer Alexandra Korokova, who had been the head of the design department at the ParaType foundry in Moscow, and who succeeded Vladimir Yefimov as ParaType’s type director after Yefimov’s death.

In addition, the Dr. Peter Karow Award was presented to Donald Knuth at the Saturday night dinner in the Winter Garden. At that time, too, I stepped down as President in favor of the incoming President, José Scaglione.

Many of the talks and exhibits were concerned with Dutch typography, but the program had a wide range of subjects and typographic cultures represented, as well as speculation on the future of responsive typography and type on screen.

On the final night, attendees experienced a storm of nearly horizontal rain as they scurried out in search of dinner.

Barcelona 2014

The venue was the brand-new Museu del Disseny (Design Museum of Barcelona), which had not even officially opened yet; the ATypI conference was the museum’s first major event. Workshops were held at BAU College of Arts and Design, a few blocks away in the Poblenau neighborhood.

One of the most memorable talks was Gerard Unger’s “Echoes from the Middle Ages,” in which he spoke about – and showed many examples of – alternative letter forms to the famous Trajan capitals: the Romanesque capitals. These freely variable forms were used especially in the first two centuries of the second millennium; they can be found in carvings and inscriptions throughout Western Europe, but they have gotten short shrift from typographic historians who prefer a neat linear progression from Trajan capitals to Carolingian minuscules to blackletter and chancery italic.

Manuel Sesma spoke about Maximilien Vox and the anti-modern “Graphie Latine” movement. Ann Bessemans spoke about “Rhythm and Legibility,” examining how variability in the rhythm of letter shapes and spaces can make type easier to read. Michael Twyman’s keynote speech, entitled “Typography as a university study,” talked about the integration of history, theory, and practice that he had encouraged over forty years at the University of Reading.

São Paulo 2015

ATypI extended its reach again in 2015, when the annual conference went to São Paulo, Brazil – for the first time in South America. The visual identity, designed by Cristian Cruz, used the distinctively Portuguese character ‘ã’ as its symbol. “What are the challenges for typography today?” asked the promotional video, setting the theme for the conference, and then listed four: typography for the web, type education, open source, and new licensing models, all of which got explored in the course of four days. The conference drew speakers and attendees from all over Latin America, both Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking, as well as much of the rest of the world.

The first keynote speaker was Catherine Dixon, who although British had spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, interacting with the local type community and falling in love with São Paulo. She began her talk, “Mas tudo bem: in search of typographic optimism,” in fluent Portuguese, then continued in English. She said that she didn’t have any answers, but wanted to kick off discussion with a series of questions about “workmanship, articulation, value, relevance, history, community, and ‘preciousness.’”

Jan Middendorp, the second keynote speaker, titled his talk “The Art, Culture, and Business of Type.” In it he explained that from the very beginning, “the type trade has always been a tricky balancing act between invention, business, and soap opera.” He celebrated the way young designers were eagerly incorporating both historical knowledge and emerging technical expertise in type design and typography. “The entire history of letter forms feeds into today’s ideas and decisions.” He had worked with MyFonts for many years before its acquisition by Monotype, when MyFonts was attempting to be an open, level playing field of font retailing; he was now working on a series of booklets for type designers to help them make better fonts, whether for MyFonts or not.

The final keynote speaker, Stephen Coles, looked at “State of the Mart. How fonts are made and sold today. How the market might look tomorrow.” He introduced Type Foundries Today, a 2011 study of independent type foundries by Roxandra Duru, which was published on Typographica. A census of font foundries followed in 2013 and gave an overview of the business.

Among the many items in the goody bag was a brochure announcing the first issue of 365typo, a typographic annual edited by Linda Kudrnovská and published by Étapes in collaboration with Typo magazine and with the support of ATypI. Members were offered a special discounted price until the end of the conference. (There was a second edition published in 2016, and a smaller selection, 52typo, in 2017, but none after that.)

Alphabettes

Although not directly connected with ATypI, the Alphabettes initiative got its start in 2015 as a blog “assembled on a whim” by Amy Papaelias and Indra Kupferschmid. The Alphabettes network has grown significantly since then, and promotes work by women and nonbinary people around the world. Many of the speakers in subsequent conferences were members of Alphabettes, which reflected how clearly the type field had ceased to be a male-only club.

Warsaw 2016

Warsaw was the setting for an important announcement for the type business: the introduction of the Variable Fonts format, an extension of the OpenType format to include flexible axes for variables like width, weight, and optical size. To some degree that recapitulated the earlier development of Multiple Master and GX fonts, but this time around, the new technology was introduced by and explicitly supported by the heavy hitters of the type business: Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe.

Polish poster design was a natural aspect of the program, including a visit to the Poster Museum. The wide-ranging program addressed subjects as diverse as Arabic type design, a typography for India, a three-script Maghribi typeface, the lost phonetic Chinese alphabet, adding capitals to Georgian type, diacritics as a means of self-identification, 19th-century stenciled posters in France, pre-DTP phototypesetting, and the work of Ladislas Mandel and his typeface for Italian telephone directories. There was a separate track about the business of type, which got a standing-room-only crowd.

As first-time attendee Tanya George, fresh from the Master program at Reading, put it: “On the whole, the conference was a rich amalgamation of different yet interrelated topics, ranging from historical research to cultural investigations, all through the critical lens of type design.”

The concluding keynote talk by Brody Neuenschwander, “It is written,” described a documentary he was then working on in Belgium for the cultural channel ARTE, ambitiously examining the entire history of handwriting.

Polish educator and academic administrator Ewa Satalecka had made the Warsaw conference happen, and, with the help of a large staff of volunteers, she made it work.

Montréal 2017

The venue was UQAM, the Université du Québec à Montréal, in the heart of the bilingual city. This was ATypI’s second conference in Canada, and the sixth in North America. The conference theme played with the name ATypI: “Atypique.”

Highlights were Paula Scher’s keynote speech, Roger Black on “The Type Boom,” and Rod McDonald’s entertaining “Type Night in Canada.”

Although it was delivered in English, Bruno Bernard’s talk bridged the French-language distance between France and Québec by introducing the final, unpublished typeface of renowned French type designer Roger Excoffon, with which he had hoped to “renew” French type design.

As one post-conference write-up pointed out, “OpenType variable fonts were only announced at ATypI Warsaw; this year, they appeared as a given and cropped up in many of the talks.”

Amy Papaelias went around during the conference interviewing participants and asking them which type designer they would like to go out to dinner with. The consensus seemed to be that everyone would like to go to dinner with Matthew Carter.

Antwerp 2018

Antwerp is the home of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, one of the primary sources of type history, housed in what was the printshop and publishing house of Christophe Plantin, in the 16th century, making it a natural host city for the ATypI conference. The theme was “Type Legacies.” The main program was presented at the Arenberg Theater, with workshops and special events at other locations around the city.

Matthew Carter explained that his keynote speech, “Over the top,” began as an update and expansion of a talk he’d given 24 years earlier, on experimental type. He exploded the “iconic version of type history” and described “a second thread, aside from the mainstream.”

Fred Smeijers delivered an inadvertant two-part keynote speech: he hadn’t realized that he was running out of time on the first day, but the committee found time for him to finish up the next day.

Sara de Bondt, who described herself as graphic designer, publisher, teacher, and researcher, gave a keynote talk called “Layered Legacies,” which described her own hybrid practice and then focused on her research into graphic design in Belgium in the 1960s and 1970s.

The closing keynote by Nelly Gable and Annie Bocel narrated the history of punchcutting and the conservation of the extensive collection of punches at the Cabinet des Poinçons at the Imprimerie Nationale.

The spirit of collaboration was expressed on a panel featuring Joana Correia, Veronika Burian, María Ramos, and Viktoriya Grabowska. Sophie Beier examined the very detailed but important subject of the relationship, in a typeface, between stroke weight and letter width. Fiona Ross and Alice Savoie gave a historical overview of “Women in Type.”

Tokyo 2019

This turned out to be the last in-person ATypI conference before the Covid-19 pandemic, though no one knew it at the time. Everyone confidently expected to see each other again a year later in Paris.

This was also only the second ATypI conference to be held in Asia, this time in Tokyo. It was sponsored by the major Japanese type foundry Morisawa. One of the outstanding presentations was by Akihiko Morisawa, whose grandfather, Nobuo Morisawa, had co-invented phototypesetting in 1924. Akihiko Morisawa’s talk, entitled “Type. My Life,” traced the history of Morisawa’s long involvement in type design and typesetting in Japan.

The venue was the Maraikan Museum, a museum of “emerging science and innovation,” in Tokyo’s Daiba district. The program had only one track, but two languages: in the main hall, an item would be presented in either English or Japanese, and in a second hall, there would be live translation of the talk.

There was a large participation by East Asian type foundries, and a significant amount of programming on the various scripts of East and Southeast Asia. One recurring theme was endangered or suppressed languages and scripts; another was the practicalities of designing typefaces for complex scripts.

Jason Pamental gave a talk about variable fonts and the future of flexible publishing. Petra Černe Oven’s closing keynote placed typography plainly in the currents of the contemporary environmental and political situation.

Morisawa’s ambitious new super-family of Latin typefaces, Role, was presented by a team from Morisawa, guided by Matthew Carter. I gave a talk about my research for the ATypI history project, particularly on the early years. Optimistically, I announced that the history would be published in a series of small booklets, beginning at the anticipated conference in Paris the following year.

Working Seminars | Colombo & Puebla 2019, Amiens 2020

In 2018, President Gerry Leonidas announced the launch of a new series of Working Seminars, with an explicitly international scope. Two seminars were held in 2019, one in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in March; the other in Puebla, Mexico, in May. A third was held in Amiens, France, in February 2020. Like so much else, the ambitious Working Seminars program got abruptly halted by the pandemic.

The Colombo seminar focused on the challenges of researching and teaching typography in the languages and scripts of South Asia, where type hadn’t been a subject taught in higher education. In Mexico, with a robust typographic community, the attendees talked not only about the teaching of type at the university level but about the state of the art for the type industry in Mexico. (This seminar was conducted in Spanish.) The Amiens seminar focused on PhD programs in typography and type design in France.

Virtual conferences 2020, 2021, 2022

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which rendered a large in-person gathering impossible, ATypI organized two virtual conferences, with the name “ATypI All Over,” and two online “Tech Talks.” In addition, the association had to deal with managing its official business remotely, including nominations and elections to the Board of Directors.

The limitations of having a conference entirely online were mitigated by the opportunity to get participation from people all around the world, without the expense and trouble of getting to a single location. Consequently, the All Over programs were even more diversified than the programs of recent in-person events. Time zone differences were the main drawback.

The first “All Over” took place October 27–31, 2021, and the last online “Tech Talks” was held almost exactly a year later, October 27–29, 2022. By that time, the effects of the pandemic were easing, and ATypI could finally plan for another in-person conference: Paris in 2023.

Manuel Sesma’s 2020 presentation, “‘Unvoxing’ the ATypI Classification,” made the case for removing the Vox system of typeface classification from ATypI’s official sanction, in favor of a less Euro-centric and “hegemonic” system.

A three-hour panel discussion, “Thinking Outside the Vox,” during the online ATypI Tech Talks 2021, took a hard look at this question. The next year, ATypI officially “de-adopted” the Vox system and initiated a working group to come up with a replacement.

Even at the non-technical “All Over” conferences, there was a major focus on technological innovation.

At the second ATypI All Over, Peter Constable wished a “Happy Fifth Anniversary, Variable Fonts.”

At the first, Dave Crossland, David Berlow, and Santiago Orozco demonstrated how you could push the boundaries of responsive typography in “Amstelvar and Roboto Flex: unprecedented flexibility in text typography.”

Niteesh Yadav made a case for “Why We Need New Typefaces for Augmented Reality.” Pascale Schmid spoke about the type used on control boards in the cockpits of commercial airliners. Adam Twardoch and Yuri Yarmola presented the latest version of FontLab (“Better Every Day”). Dilek Nur Polat Ünsür explained “How Newspapers Familiarized Readers with the Latin Script during the Turkish Alphabet Reform.”

Overall, the program, though virtual, was as varied and eclectic at Type All Over as at an in-person ATypI conference.

Paris 2023

At last, ATypI returned to its roots in Paris, in the first in-person conference since the Covid-19 pandemic. At the opening night reception, it was obvious how glad people were to see each other in the flesh again; there were grins on many of the faces.

It was also a hybrid conference, with remote participation as well as in person.

The primary venue was the Pierre and Marie Curie campus of the Sorbonne, in the 5th arrondissement, very much in the heart of the city. On the first day, there was a limited-capacity visit to the Imprimerie Nationale. Morisawa, a major sponsor, put on an invitational river cruise down the Seine.

There were four keynote talks: Véronique Vienne, “The Weight of the Ink”; Véronique Marrier, “Collecting and promoting typography and type design”; Mathieu Lehanneur, “The Shortest Distance Between Things and Minds”; Alice Savoie and Thomas Huot-Marchand, “Filiation: Nurturing a pedagogy of type design in France.”

A notable panel discussion looked at “Power in the World of Type,” the factors that affect who has power and who does not in the type industry. The panelists were Ann Bessemans, Laura Meseguer, Lynne Yun, Nadine Chahine, and Veronika Burian.

One of the more unusual talks was Sina Fakour’s on reviving the ancient Linear Elamite script, which new research suggested was the first phonetic writing system, predating the Phoenician script by centuries.

The conference finished off with a “closing extravaganza” in the indoor leafy garden at Café A, inside the Maison des Architectes at the Couvent des Récollets.

Since 2023

Since then, conferences have been held in Brisbane, Australia (2024), which was the second ATypI conference in the southern hemisphere, and in Copenhagen (2025). In 2026, for the first time, ATypI planned two conferences: one at Stanford University, in California, the other at the University of the Arts Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates.