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This year, ATypI (the Association Typographique Internationale) held its annual conference in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic; appropriately enough, the theme was “Crossroads of Civilizations.” This put the focus clearly on Prague’s position in the heart of Central Europe, a crossroads between West and East, once a part of the Soviet empire but now newly welcomed into the European Union, a city with very deep cultural roots indeed.
In its long history, Prague has been at the crossroads between Latin and Cyrillic scripts; at a religious crossroads, first between Catholic and Orthodox, then between Catholic and Protestant; at the ethnic and linguistic crossroads between Slavic and German cultures; and at the modern political crossroads between capitalism and communism. It could easily be said, too, that Prague has always been at a crossroads between art and politics—though that is an intersection that we all seem to find ourselves at.
In recent years, Prague has also been a favorite of expatriate Americans, to the point where some of them dubbed it “the Paris of the Nineties.” For many of the visiting typographers and type designers last week, the central attraction was the city itself.
Prague has the distinction of being largely undestroyed by the upheavals of its long history, including the devastations of the Second World War. This means that the Renaissance and Baroque city is on display, with the Romanesque city approachable in many places as a sort of bottom layer, and that many later architectural styles exist in the midst of this. The city is full of Art Nouveau and Art Deco marvels; it is also the only place where Cubism was developed not just as a painting style but as architecture too. The city’s textures are absorbing, and in the present day most of it is well kept up.
As Berlin type designer Erik Spiekermann put it, wryly but regretfully, “This is what all of our cities would look like if we hadn’t started a war, and they hadn’t all got bombed.” Although I had described to me some of the awful late-Soviet apartment blocks on the outskirts, the heart of the city remains intact. That’s why, as was pointed out to us frequently, Prague is used these days as the set for so many movies. Although there is nothing twee or behind-the-times about Prague, every once in a while as I walked the streets I would find myself feeling that I had strolled into 1938.
Deeply Embedded
We didn’t have much chance to stroll the streets, however, unless we played hooky from the conference program, which was concentrated at the Archa Theater (Divadlo Archa), Prague’s best-known avant-garde theatrical venue. The Archa’s nondescript plate-glass entrance opens off a covered passage on a busy street, and the guts of the theater lie underground, down flights of wide steps that create several levels. We spent most of our time in stylishly dark theater spaces or the underground café or in the central open space between staircases. The arrangement made it easy to find people, and the convenient café served as a constant meeting or perching place, but without our watches and our laptops and the pocket program we would have had no idea whether it was night or day outside.
Happily, there were several events scheduled for other venues, so we got to see some unique parts of the city. Thursday night’s opening reception was held down the street in the Café Imperial, an Art Nouveau wonder whose walls are intricately decorated with colorful tiles; it was once the posh café of a turn-of-the-century grand hotel. For the “gala dinner,” an ATypI tradition, most of the attendees were bused across the city to the Brevnov Monastery, where we were wined and dined in a series of arched stone halls. For those who arrived at the conference early (but weren’t sucked into the pre-conference Tech Forum), there was a reception at the Museum of Decorative Arts, where an exhibition of Czech and Slovak experimental typography had been extended for an extra day just for ATypI. And on Saturday night the students of the co-hosting VSUP (School of Arts, Architecture, and Design) threw a noisy and boisterous “Kerning Party” at their school, near the river in the old town.
Talking to Each Other
Rick Poynor got the program off to a lively start with his keynote speech on Thursday evening. He spoke about his perceptions of recent graphic design in Central and Eastern Europe, in the variety of countries that were within the Soviet sphere for so long, and about what some of their opportunities and pitfalls might be. In particular, he suggested that local designers not look just to the existing Western consumer culture (very obvious in the touristed sections of Prague) but to their own roots and creativity—that they bring something new to the creative table, something that designers in the West might learn from. Poynor took great pains not to appear to be dictating to local cultures, but of course plenty of people in the audience took exception to one point or another. The Q&A session was lively indeed. At first it was other visitors who argued with him, but soon the Czech typographers got into the fray too. He got them all talking, which is a great way to kick off a conference.
There were two tracks of programming, in the two main halls, with an intermittent third track in a smaller room off the café. As always happens, there were too many program items for anyone to get to them all. The main thread of programming dealt with Czech and other Central and Eastern European type and design; a secondary thread, part of which I organized, dealt with the design and typography of newspapers. Between getting my own two panels set up and attending various meetings connected with the ATypI board, I felt that I got only a slight taste of the main subject. But my experience was presumably atypical.
One of the items I did manage to see was a celebration of the life and work of Josef Tyfa, whose type designs and graphic designs have been at the top of the Czech typographical world for decades. Tyfa himself, at the age of 92, couldn’t attend because of his health; I was very disappointed not to meet him, but pleased to get an overview of his work, since I had written about him when ITC issued a digital version of his Tyfa type family several years ago. (The typeface, originally designed for hot metal, was digitized by Frantisek Storm, who has done much to popularize Tyfa’s work in the West, and to bring it into digital form. Although ITC Tyfa is based on a display or large-text size, Storm has issued an alternate version, Tyfa Text, optimized for text composition, from his own digital Storm Type Foundry.)
The newspaper-design thread featured a talk by Christian Schwartz (as part of the single-track “plenary session” at the beginning of the conference) about the creation of the first Venetian old-style text face for newspapers; a survey of Spanish newspaper design by the genial Angel J. Castaños Martínez; and two panels that I moderated, one on newspaper design and one about typefaces designed specifically for newspapers. I tried to make the two panels interactive, both among the panelists and between the panels and the audience; I seem to have succeeded in the first, though perhaps not in the second. (This approach was a deliberate attempt on my part to get away from formal presentations and make the event more of a conversation. It remains to be seen whether this proves to be a fruitful direction to move in. I’m well aware of the pitfalls of programming that gets too loose and informal. But we’re nowhere near that yet.)
In keeping with the “crossroads” theme, Maxim Zhukov chaired a series of short presentations on Sunday about multilingual typography, which included the first discussion of Microsoft’s upcoming release of an ambitious set of multi-script fonts optimized for ClearType.
New Directions
This year saw a changing of the guard in ATypI as an organization. Longtime president Mark Batty stepped down, named as “honorary president” by the board of directors, and a large slate of new members joined the board. Jean François Porchez, who has been vice-president for several years, was elected as the new president, with John Hudson (co-organizer of last year’s conference in Vancouver) as the new vice-president. Both promised change. Although there are many different ideas about where ATypI should go in the future, and what shape the organization ought to take as the type world evolves, the new energy is bound to make things happen.
ATypI’s 2005 conference will be held September 15–18 in Helsinki.
This article was last modified on February 17, 2022
This article was first published on October 11, 2004
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