dot-font: Typographic High in SF

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.

From its modest beginnings as a tiny gathering of type fans and independent type designers in exurban Westborough, Mass., in 1998, TypeCon has grown to become one of the important typographic conferences of the year. This was the first TypeCon I had attended since that earliest one, so the contrast was striking. Even in an era when fonts are in the hands of almost everyone, too few opportunities exist for people who are passionate about type (whether they work with it professionally or simply enjoy it) to get together and share their enthusiasm. TypeCon is one such venue.

Like the more international ATypI conferences, TypeCon moves around. This year it was held in San Francisco, which is both a cultural center and a center of the software business, of which type, these days, is a part. (The Bay Area also boasts a long history of printing and typesetting in metal, hot or otherwise, and formidable resources for studying that history and seeing it in action.) The conference was put together with the help of two local institutions, the San Francisco Center for the Book and the California College for the Arts, along with the national organizing body, SOTA (the Society of Typographic Aficionados). The spearhead of all this activity was SOTA executive director Tamye Riggs.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Although TypeCon has only one track of programming, the organizers tried to cram in a lot—too much, in fact. The tone was set at a pre-opening event on Wednesday night in a downtown auditorium, where those present got a two-part program of David Peters showing classic movie-title sequences by Saul Bass, and Victor Moscoso telling the tale of his days drawing concert posters in the heyday of San Francisco’s acid-rock music scene.

Each of these two items would have made a fine evening in itself; combined, they just ran too long—even more so when they were divided by a “sneak preview” of the film program for TypeCon. All of the parts of this evening, like the events of the ensuing days, were fascinating, but taken together they became exhausting. The same thing happened the next night, when the opening reception, including presentation of a series of type-design awards from Linotype, ran so long that some people gave up and didn’t stay for the full TypeCon film program.

There were some notable highlights among the talks and presentations. Roger Black kicked off the regular programming, at an ungodly hour of the morning, by talking about “Custom Type for Magazines”—an important source of revenue for type designers these days. Dan X. Solo closed things down on Sunday with a lament for letterpress, “The Day Gutenberg Died,” ending with a tear in his eye as he described the bitter day on which the assets of ATF, the American Type Founders, were dispersed at a bankruptcy auction.

In between these bookends, Shelly Gruendler of the St. Bride Foundation recounted how she found the source for Beatrice Warde’s famous image of typography as a “crystal goblet”; Linotype’s Akira Kobayashi showed the upcoming revised version of Hermann Zapf’s famous typeface Palatino (including a sans-serif variant); designer and performance artist Ayana Baltrip interviewed Emory Douglas about his days as the graphic designer to the Black Panther party (deftly mixing typographic design with life-and-death political struggle); printer Alistair Johnston wandered the streets of the Third World in search of type and lettering; and Jim Parkinson and Dave Farey did what I think of as “the Jim and Dave show,” tapdancing through their parallel experiences designing nameplates and display type for any number of famous publications.

Figure 1: Original drawings for ITC Benguiat Gothic, by Ed Benguiat, on exhibit at TypeCon.

Ed Benguiat, who has a serious claim to being the most prolific type designer in history, and whose hand provided so much of the visual style of the ’70s and ’80s, was honored and celebrated. Ilene Strizver, former type director of International Typeface Corporation, who by her own account owes her career to Ed Benguiat, gave a moving description of how she first encountered him. Ken Barber presented House Industries’ new line of “Ed” typefaces, based on several Benguiat originals. And Allan Haley presented Ed with SOTA’s first award. Benguiat himself was earthy, smart-aleck, funny, and visibly moved.

Three’s Not a Crowd

I was on a panel about type-related books, “With One Leap They Were Bound” (title courtesy of Steve Woodall, the Center for the Book’s artistic director, who moderated the panel and kept things moving), along with Jan Middendorp and Saki Mafundikwa. I talked briefly about “Newspaper Design“; Jan talked about his new book, “Dutch Type”; and Saki described the genesis of his ground-breaking “Afrikan Alphabets.” The common thread among these three books is that each of them was conceived as a whole, with content and design thoroughly integrated. (Each of them was also for sale at the table manned by Alan Silver of William Stout Architectural Books, one of the best stores in the Bay Area for type and design books.) Each of us made a short presentation, then Steve peppered us with questions and took questions from the audience.

Figure 2: John Berry (left) and Saki Mafundikwa after the panel about new type-related books.

I tend to enjoy panels, at least when they’re really interactive: among the panelists and also between the panelists and the audience. Then they become real discussions, and break down the formality of official presentations, which are essentially illustrated lectures. Of course, I’ve seen the weak side of panels, too: the kind where the participants seem to have just woken up from a nice nap, looked around, and muttered audibly, “What am I doing here?” None of that occurred at TypeCon.

The Typo-Bears’ Picnic

The social events were highlights of TypeCon, too—as you might expect. The auction, on Friday night, with auctioneer Dave Farey, functioned both as a fundraiser and as entertainment, just as these events usually do. Saturday night’s party, dubbed “Digikana” and featuring music by Joachim Müller-Lancé’s “Japanese punk pop band,” was held in a loft space that could only be reached through a single smallish elevator and a tedious process of checking one’s name off a list; when you got to the top, you found ample food and drink, a thumping base, and what turned into a typically rowdy Type Quiz.

The culminating event, after the official end of the conference, was a picnic on Sunday night at Stone’s walnut ranch and digital type foundry, “Alphabet Farm.” Since this spread is more than halfway up the Capay Valley, an inland valley to the east of the Napa Valley wine country and a two-hour drive from San Francisco, it was a lot hotter than the foggy coastal city. A large proportion of the attendees of TypeCon bundled themselves into buses and made the trek, for a catered Mexican picnic under the twilit walnut trees. I don’t think anyone regretted the journey. It was a fine way to end the weekend.

Figure 3: At the closing party at Alphabet Farm: from left, Rick Cusick, Sumner Stone, Georgianna Greenwood, and Michael Harvey.

As Joachim announced on Saturday night (by accident, he let the name drop before he meant to, causing him much embarrassment and everyone else much amusement), next year’s TypeCon will be in New York City, hosted by the Type Directors Club at the Parsons School of Design.

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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