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.
People who work with type have a tendency to get together in groups, clubs, and organizations. Once, when typesetting depended on expensive machinery, arcane skills, and proprietary hardware, these were clearly defined industry bodies. Today, with the desktop democratization of type, the skills are still arcane (or at least demanding), but the user base has expanded many times over. You can overhear a conversation about kerning while you ride a city bus. (Yes, I have.) And the needs for information, standards of craftsmanship, and plain old sense of community have expanded too.
With interest in type becoming more widespread, the older typographic organizations—such as ATypI and the Type Directors Club—have a golden opportunity to reach a wider audience, but they’re also struggling with the shrinking of the old industrial base and trying to find new ways to connect with their natural constituency.
Changing Times, Changing Business
I wrote in a recent column about ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) and its upcoming annual conference in Leipzig in September. ATypI was, according to type historian James Mosley, originally conceived as a European-based typographic supergroup (its first proposed name was Union Typographique Européenne)—although Mosley adds that “the earliest letter from Peignot to Dreyfus (14 June 1955) shows that he was responding to a US initiative.” (Charles Peignot, proprietor of the type foundry Deberny et Peignot, was the founder of ATypI. Monotype’s John Dreyfus was another of the industry leaders who were instrumental in the process.) In any case, by the time the organization was formally launched in June of 1957, during an event named “Graphic 57” in Lausanne, Switzerland, it had the international name it bears today.
ATypI began as an association of manufacturers of typesetting equipment and other interested parties. It was an “industry body,” trying to set standards, to promote typography, and, in particular, to prevent font piracy. (Piracy of type designers’ efforts was every bit as prevalent in years gone by as it is today; advancing technology has only expanded the opportunity for piracy along with the spread of type-producing software and hardware.) In more recent years, some prominent members of the type community have lambasted ATypI for failing to halt piracy of type designs. Others have pointed out that the only real authority an organization of this kind has is moral—and even there, outside of the really egregious cases, one person’s piracy may be another’s homage. The legal intricacies, of course, are multiplied by the number of countries involved—and to most judges, juries, and legal experts, typography is an esoteric field by which they have no standards to judge.
Today, ATypI serves as a way for the typographic community to keep itself together and stay in touch, and to make the collective knowledge embodied in the field available to newer practitioners. And it is, without a doubt, the most aggressively international of typographic bodies.
The Need for Type Directors
The New York-based Type Directors Club (TDC) is perhaps the most well-known and prestigious typographic association in the United States—although its reach is, in fact, international, with its traveling exhibits in several countries, its many overseas members, and its particularly strong and active membership in Germany. TDC was formed in 1946, when the term “type director” really meant something. The type director, in an ad agency or a graphic design studio, was the one who ultimately approved the treatment of the type (which would be set, usually, by an outside type house at great cost). As I’ve written before (in an editorial in the Summer 1999 issue of the now-defunct type magazine U&lc), it’s ironic that today the job description “type director” is nearly extinct, when in fact it’s needed more than ever. In an era when the actual setting of type is brought in-house and relegated to graphic designers as a necessary part of their job, there’s a crying need for a new breed of type directors, trained in their craft as well as in the technology.
TDC may once have been a “club,” but it has long since outgrown that cozy scale. Its membership is open to anyone practicing typography in any form and anyone associated with typography, and as its locally based small events in New York City have died back a bit in recent years, its large conferences have attracted attendees from around the country, and its presence is felt around the world. (My first “dot-font” column was about the presentation of the TDC medal to Colin Brignall in London earlier this year, and this year’s second TDC medal will be presented to Gunter Gerhard Lange in Leipzig during the ATypI conference.)
If ATypI has its origins among type manufacturers, TDC finds its roots among professional users of type, particularly in the realms of advertising and book publishing (both of which were, and continue to be, strongly focused on New York). Potentially, and logically, any graphic designer who does anything with type has a compelling reason to belong to one or both of these organizations, just as he or she might join a local chapter of the AIGA. (And in fact the overlap of all professional design associations is very large, though by no means complete.) Different organizations provide emphases on different aspects of the design business; TDC and ATypI represent the deepest knowledge base in typography.
Everything Connects
In this country, other organizations cover various aspects of lettering and type:
- The Typophiles (also in New York) have historically produced some of the most memorable small books about type, in their series of Typophile Chapbooks.
- The American Printing History Association (APHA) has sponsored talks and published in-depth looks at new and old typography in its journal.
- The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA), besides forcing many of us to learn how to spell “aficionado,” has been a grassroots group of people who use and love type, organizing two small conferences priced on a scale much below the usual professional affair. SOTA has attracted the active interest of quite a few independent type designers.
- In the related field of calligraphy, strong regional organizations such as the Society of Scribes, in New York, and the Friends of Calligraphy, in San Francisco, promote excellence in the lettering arts.
This list is by no means exhaustive. (I welcome additions to it, for possible future columns.) And I’m not even dealing here with the numerous type organizations in other countries, such as the Typographic Circle in London or the Gutenberg Society in Germany.
Next Week in San Francisco
In San Francisco, where I moved recently, there is a complex skein of older organizations devoted to various aspects of printing, type, or lettering. But, despite the Bay Area’s rich typographic history, when I asked people here about a type-specific organization that would reach out to all the various constituencies with an interest in type, they said there seemed to be a gap.
And some of them took this as a challenge. With this potential in mind, a few of us have organized a kick-off event to bring people together and explore the idea of a new West Coast type organization. (Thanks to Kevin Farnham and the other enthusiastic minds at the graphic design studio Method, the group already has a potential name: Typeset.) Taking advantage of summer visits by two international typographers—one from Europe (Erik Spiekermann, of MetaDesign and FontShop in Berlin), the other from Africa (Saki Mafundikwa, founder and director of ZIVA, the school of graphic design and new media in Harare, Zimbabwe)—we gave the event a “global” theme, calling it “Two Global Guys.” Their dialog should be fascinating in its own right, and it establishes the wide-ranging scope of this putative new organization.
If you’re in San Francisco on Thursday, August 10, drop by the Thick House, 1695 18th Street, at 7 p.m., and join us. The theater will hold only 100 people, so show up early. (You can send a note to ty*****@****od.com to let them know you’re coming.) See you there.
This article was last modified on April 7, 2022
This article was first published on August 3, 2000
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