dot-font: It's All Good in Denmark

dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.  If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here.  You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

This year’s ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) conference took place as scheduled last weekend in Copenhagen. That alone seems a remarkable thing, given not only the economic downturn in the high-tech industry but also the dramatic effects of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. What’s even more surprising is that Copenhagen had the highest attendance of any ATypI conference in several years. A number of prominent people who would usually attend couldn’t make it, either because of Sept. 11 or for more mundane, ordinary reasons, but the organizers made whatever adjustments were necessary and the show went on.

But First…

Following a pattern established in recent years, the conference was preceded on Thursday by a day of optional events before the official opening on Thursday evening. Having such optional outings and seminars gives the conference more flexibility and a little extra running time without forcing everyone who attends to plan on a long, four-day event. The pattern recently has been for the conference proper to run from Thursday evening until midday Sunday, ending with the ATypI annual general meeting after Sunday lunch, but to include optional events during the day on Thursday and sometimes afterward on Sunday afternoon or Monday. This will probably be the pattern of next year’s conference, too.

There were three optional alternatives on Thursday. The only problem with this was that they all ran concurrently, so you could only do one at a time; I would happily have attended all three. This kind of “problem” persisted through the conference, when there were inevitably conflicts between two tracks of programming. (Since I was on the program this year at several times, I couldn’t always hop back and forth as freely as I might otherwise.) Thursday offered the options of the ATypI Font Technology Forum, with presentations by experts on Unicode and OpenType, cross-platform font development, and handling non-Latin and extended character sets; an E-book Seminar, which examined the state of the industry and looked forward to the possibilities and pitfalls of online and onscreen publishing; and, for those who weren’t ready to plunge into technical subjects, an excursion to the Graphic Museum of Denmark. (I spoke at the E-book Seminar, mostly making a plea for real typography in e-books; so much effort has been put into creating fonts for the screen and hinting them or otherwise optimizing their display that many people have forgotten that it’s how you use the fonts that makes all the difference.)

Parallel Tracks Never Meet

There was, of course, a strongly Scandinavian thread running through the program. The first keynote speaker, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, set the stage by tying in typography and one of Denmark’s most famous writers, Søren Kierkegaard. The 19th-century philosopher took an intense interest in the typographic arrangement of his books, specifying the kinds of type to be used (roman, italic, and several kinds of blackletter) for different elements and different kinds of text. (This prompted Cappelørn’s wonderful observation that, for Kierkegaard, “to be anxious is to be italic.”) As I listened to this talk, I thought that Kierkegaard was really indulging in an early, low-tech version of tagged and structured text—the very thing that our font and information technologists are working on so hard these days.

The specifically Scandinavian track, with talks on Danish and Swedish letters in the 20th century, was opposite the “Type Grocery” track, where the proprietors of small, independent type foundries presented their work and their business models. I had to miss the first track because I chose the second. Perhaps the most impressive, or at least crowd-pleasing, feature of the Type Grocery track was Jeremy Tankard‘s QuickTime tour of his London studio, complete with panning views and drawers and cupboards that opened, like a digital Advent calendar. Though for me the most piquant moment was seeing Jean-François Porchez‘s spacious studio next to his house—having visited Jean-François when he and his young family were crammed into a small apartment and his work space was half of the kitchen. Jean-François admitted to liking to design the black weights of fonts the best (no wonder they have such liveliness as well as weight!). He also showed us a display typeface he designed for use in the regional French newspaper “Charente Libre,” with letterforms that can endure being stretched or squashed digitally (within reason) and still look good: “the poor man’s multiple master.”

The track that needed the most last-minute juggling was “Dialogue among Civilizations,” with presentations on a variety of non-Latin scripts (plus Adam Twardoch‘s entertaining and enlightening tour of Polish diacritical marks, “Pickled herring with strawberry ice cream”—not a favorite Polish dessert, he explained, but a description of what some badly designed diacritics can look like when they’re just slapped onto an existing Western typeface without much forethought). The Hebrew types by Zvi Narkiss, shown by Yanek Iontef because Narkiss could not make the trip from Israel, were particularly beautiful. One of the presentations was to have been by Prof. Ngo Thanh Nhan, about the revival of the traditional, non-alphabetic Nôm script for written Vietnamese; because he couldn’t make it to Copenhagen from New York, I stepped in, since I had worked with him on the book “Spring Essence,” the first book ever to use Nôm as digital type, and I had a couple of relevant files on my laptop. All I could do, as a non-Vietnamese speaker, was give a faint, fleeting taste of Nôm, but that seemed better than silence.

You ARE in Denmark, So…

The planned wrap-up talk by Erik Spiekermann, “Sex and Type and Rock ‘n’ Roll,” didn’t take place, because Erik was among those who couldn’t make it to Copenhagen. But the usual entertainment value of an ATypI conference was maintained by events such as the gala dinner at Base Camp, a converted cannon factory and “Copenhagen’s coolest club venue”; a planned excursion for night birds to Club Vega one night and another club the next; and the auction, run this year by Mark Batty, where the highest-ticket item was a box full of assorted wood type bought by a consortium of Danish students.

This was one of the most smoothly organized ATypI conferences I’ve attended, and the organizers pulled it off under trying circumstances. Next year’s conference will take place in Rome, the heartland of roman type; the program is being put together now. The year after that, it will be in Vancouver, and the 2004 conference is tentatively planned for Prague.

Oh, yes—according to a highly unscientific survey of small, informal signage around the city (basically, whatever I happened to be looking at at the time), the most popular typeface in Copenhagen seems to be Microsoft’s Comic Sans.

John D. Berry is a typographer, book designer, design writer, editor, and typographic consultant. He is a former President of ATypI, and he is the founder and director of the Scripta Typographic Institute.
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