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As you might imagine, the city of Rome was a wonderful place to hold the annual conference of the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). There may be no place in the world, even in Egypt or Greece, where the history and development of letters is more evident everywhere you turn. Contemporary shop signs in all the usual digital fonts and carved pseudo-classical lettering from the Fascist era sit cheek-by-jowl with imperial Roman inscriptions, medieval Christian lettering, and the accumulated graffiti of more than 2,000 years.
Troppo, Troppo!
ATypI’s conferences always deal with a diversity of subjects, in myriad ways. Besides learned historical talks and stirring calls to arms, you’ll find demonstrations and hands-on workshops in crafts such as carving letters in stone, exhibits of the best typographic work from around the world, and thoughtful examinations of the state of both the technology and the art of type. Every year, there are too many things going on simultaneously, so that you’re always caught wishing you could be in two places at once; this year, the programming was even more extensive than usual, so you could find yourself torn among three or even four choices. My path through the conference was even more limited than most, because on the first day I was concerned with last-minute preparations for my own talk that evening, and on the next two mornings I started the day at ATypI board meetings. Most attendees wouldn’t have quite so many obligations pulling them in different directions.
This year there was, not surprisingly, a strong emphasis on Italian type and graphic design. An entire separate track of programming, the “Italian Design Forum” (in Italian), ran through two full days, organized by two different Italian design organizations: the first day by AIAP (Associazione Italiana Progettazione Comunicazione Visiva) and the second by IUAV (Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, Facoltà di Design e Arti). This served, by all accounts, as an unparalleled opportunity for local Italian designers to get together under the auspices of ATypI. The disadvantage of having this running as a separate program track is that, naturally enough, most of the Italian delegates spent their time listening to the Italian speakers, while most of the other delegates listened to one of the two other program tracks, in English.
I speak a little Italian, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover how much came back to me when I got to Rome. (I was able to converse reasonably well—in very bad Italian, no doubt—as I wandered around the city and navigated the transit system.) When I first came into the main auditorium to hear the first of three keynote speeches, by the influential professor and graphic designer Giovanni Lussu, I failed to pick up a headset for the simultaneous translation. Lussu delivered his speech in elegant, forceful Italian; I found that I could follow most of what he was saying, although I’m sure I missed many nuances (and I’d like to read a transcript eventually).
Lussu kicked off the conference by asking whether typography really is the only way for us to give visual form to our speech in the modern day. He urged us, with full respect for typography, to go beyond typography. Sometimes this kind of notion has been an excuse for laziness or excess, but Giovanni Lussu’s approach was nothing like that; it was a reasoned attempt to extend the boundaries of speech.
Speaking in Tongues
On the third day, in the same room where the Italian Design Forum had taken place, Sherry Blankenship put together a jam-packed “Multi-Lingual Typography Symposium.” Again, as Blankenship pointed out, this is something that could have been incorporated into the main stream of programming, rather than separated out into its own ghetto; but the concentration of many different perspectives on the overall topic of multilingual type made for a rich stew of ideas and images.
I caught only a small part of it, but the two talks I did hear, Victor Gaultney’s on the challenges of designing extended Latin typefaces (capable of typesetting any language that uses the Latin alphabet, including alternate letters and all kinds of diacritical marks) and Hrant Papazian’s on Armenian type design and how it gets influenced by the urge to make it similar to Latin letters, were both fascinating. Papazian showed two versions of a combined Armenian/Latin type family: one where the Latin letters are designed to fit harmoniously into a passage of Armenian script, and one where the Armenian was meant to harmonize with the Latin. The differences were instructive. Gaultney showed his extended typeface Gentium, which is an elegant-looking type family that he developed as an academic project, and which he gives away for free. Gentium was one of the winning typefaces in the bukva:raz! competition, and Gaultney included a booklet showing the typeface in the conference’s goodie bag.
Pens at 30 Paces
The seemingly sedate craft of lettering can generate controversy. One of the dramatic highlights of the conference was the lettering “duel” between Cynthia Batty and John Downer, held in the main auditorium during the lunch hour one day. There was no rancor involved; it was, rather, a question of technique, and of interpretation of the writings of Father Catich, the Iowa sign-painter who claimed to have figured out how the lettering on the Trajan column was originally created, and where the serifs came from. (Catich said that the letters were first painted on the stone, then carved, exactly as the painted letters were drawn. His revolutionary point was that the serifs came from the painting technique, not from any stone-cutting technique of “finishing off the stroke,” as earlier writers had insisted.)
Two easels were set up in front of the stage, and first Downer and then Batty demonstrated their ideas of how letters were formed historically. Downer has sign-writing experience; Batty has calligraphic experience. Both of them have designed noteworthy typefaces. Downer’s demonstration started out to make Catich’s points, then he went on to show his own differences with Catich and his preferences in how letters should be drawn. Batty demonstrated how the technique of brush manipulation—twisting the axis of a flat-edged brush or other writing tool to modulate the stroke—was clearly used in more than 1,000 years of Western lettering, until the advent of chancery script in the Renaissance.
These may sound like obscure distinctions, and indeed many of the listeners felt that it was a difference in emphasis rather than a true disagreement, but the wit and flair with which both Downer and Batty delivered their ideas and bantered with each other made the whole event both enlightening and entertaining. The audience started getting into the spirit, calling out questions and arguments themselves; stonecutter John Benson was among those with vocal opinions from the side.
And So On
I’ve touched on only a few aspects of the ATypI conference. The main track of programming, with its speeches in the large auditorium, was enough to keep one happily occupied all by itself. The setting, in Rome’s outskirts in EUR, the overbearing exhibition town begun by Mussolini and completed after WWII, was functional but a remarkable contrast to the happy chaos of Rome. The food, as one might expect, was wonderful. The many exhibits, of the winners of both ATypI’s bukva:raz! and the Type Directors Club’s competition, of rubbings taken from stone inscriptions in Rome and elsewhere in Italy, of Italian design, and of the Treasures of St Bride’s Library, provided a dense visual backdrop to the event. The ATypI book “Language Culture Type” was launched at the conference, and each paying attendee got a copy. The Charles Peignot Award, for an outstanding type designer under the age of 35, was given to Jonathan Hoefler (who smiled a lot). Ancillary activities, such as Paul Stiff’s walking tour of lettering in the historic center of Rome or the side trip to Ostia Antica, extended the conference in the days both before and after its official span.
Next year’s conference will be in Vancouver, September 24–28, 2003.
This article was last modified on March 9, 2022
This article was first published on October 7, 2002
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