Typblography

I am in the midst of a lot of public speaking right now. The last few days it’s been at the ATypI conference in St Petersburg, Russia (where, to my considerable surprise, I was one of a number of recipients of a medal from the Russian government last night – it’s a strange world, friends).

Monday night (tomorrow) at the InDesign User Group in London, England, I’ll be doing an updated version of my favorite talk: Typography for Humans. “Traditonal typography was restricted by mechanical limitations. However, the digital technology of OpenType has spawned fonts which celebrate the human hand and the human mind, from random elements that mimic handwriting and calligraphy, to fonts that translate themselves, censor themselves, or predict the future. Along the way, fine typography is largely automated. But it is still easy to create typography which, in favoring aesthetics or tradition over legibility, fails to achieve its basic purpose of communication. Thomas Phinney explores and demonstrates these human and anti-human developments on the frontiers of digital typography, with typefaces created by himself, his Adobe colleagues, and others around the world.”

Admission is free, and if it’s like other IDUG meetings I’ve been to, so is the pizza.

October 18th, at the AIGA “Social Studies” conference (graphic design education conference) in Baltimore, I’ll be doing a short talk on legibility in typography.

October 23rd, I’ll be giving the same talk as the London one above, at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.

October 27th I’ll be speaking at the University of Lethbridge (Canada).

As part of this late October road trip, I may also line up something in Calgary and possibly Vancouver as well… TBD. Let me know if you have any suggestions of people I should work with to arrange such a talk.

The 2008 conference of the International Typographic Association (ATypI) will take place in St Petersburg, Russia, September 17-21. The deadline for talk proposals for both the main track and the TypeTech Forum is Thursday, March 27th. Details here.

[UPDATE March 27th: Deadline extended to Monday, April 14th.]

For the TypeTech Forum section of the conference, I also welcome any proposals for longer workshops, say half-day or full-day, if the topic will be of interest to a sufficient proportion of font developers.

There’s a day-and-a-half “Font Business Summit” on April 3-4, hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and organized by the Font Designers Rights Coalition (FDRC).

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Miguel Sousa, David Lemon and I attended Linotype’s “TypoTechnica” conference recently. Here are our presentations, followed by a review of the conference and some talks.

Facelift presentation (150K PDF). My talk on why we’re revising the entire Adobe Type Library, and what kinds of technical tweaks we’re making.

Font naming presentation (2 MB PDF). This talk explains a lot about font names and style links in OpenType fonts. It seems I do this every year or two. I realized in giving this talk that I needed to update some of the slides with newer FontLab screen shots, so I did that, and it’s the updated slides that I am posting.

Glyph naming presentation (100K PDF). Another perennial favorite, which I covered in the same session as font naming.

Font Production at Adobe (150K PDF). Miguel Sousa gave this first in-depth look at the current Adobe OpenType font production process.

Font testing at Adobe (2.3 MB PDF). Miguel looks at the range of tools and procedures needed to test OpenType fonts.

QE Outputs (250K PDF). Samples of output from testing tools, goes with Miguel’s Font Testing talk.

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Every couple of years in June there’s this cool typography conference in Thessaloniki, Greece. Well, maybe more tropically warm, but you get the idea. This year, besides the conference and other events June 18-24, there’s a Greek type design contest. Luckily, you don’t even have to do a full typeface, just these words: ένα αναμφισβήτητα ξεχωριστό γεγονός.

The contest has a bunch of categories (text, display, pixel, experiemental) and you’re free to do anything from a traditional font to photography, video, animation or CGI. The deadline is May 31st, and there are valuable prizes. Details here (note the links at the top for all the different sections). Thanks to Eirini Vlachou for the tip!

In related news, the Type Directors Club in NYC is holding the second in a series of “Non-Latin Weekend” type design seminars, Oct 5-7. This time it’s Gerry Leonidas, on Greek type design. This is the same guy who consults for companies such as Adobe and Microsoft to help us get our Greek typefaces looking good. I’m hoping we can send two or three people, because this is sure to be worthwhile for anybody who would like to design Greek typefaces (or typefaces that include Greek, as most of ours do these days).

I promised a number of folks that I would make my recent presentations at the international typography conference, ATypI, available. So here are my presentations and those of several colleagues from ATypI 2006 Lisbon. What is the ATypI conference? I wrote about it a bit in this post on font conferences.

First, a cautionary note: these are the *slides* from the presentations, usually not including talking points. So many of these will be of most use to people who were there. Also, I will continue to add TypeTech presentations to this post as more come in.

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Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) Annual Conference
Lisbon, Portugal, 27 Sep – 1 Oct, 2006

March 21, 2006 – Call for Presentation Proposals for the TypeTech Forum of the ATypI Lisbon 2006 conference.

The Board of Directors of ATypI is proud to note that the ATypI Conference is sponsored by many of the leading companies in the graphic arts and computing. Early sponsorship for Lisbon comes from the Microsoft Corporation.

The ATypI 2006 TypeTech Forum committee invites submissions of abstracts for presentations on any theme related to technology in type design and typesetting. Based on previous feedback, there will be no separate introductory section this year; potential presenters should assume that their audience is versed in the basics of type technology, such as Unicode and OpenType.

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It seems like these days I go to, and usually speak at, at least three type conferences a year. Each is quite different in strengths and flavor. As I prepare to go to my third and final type conference of the year, the St Bride conference in London next week, it gets me thinking about the general topic. So here I present my thoughts on each one’s strengths and differences.

I can’t pretend this is a completely objective analysis: I count the people behind all of these conferences as friends and colleagues, I’m on the board of directors of ATypI, and there’s a conference I’ve never been to (TypoBerlin). But I genuinely like all the ones I’ve attended, while still appreciating their differences.

Here are my capsule reviews on the various conferences….

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