The Typ09 conference came to a close on Friday and it was a really interesting experience. Type design is a whole world that I didn’t really know much about, considering the fact I’ve been working on NextText for over three years.
It had been a while since I had attended a conference, and although I usually have a problem with the closed bubble around these events, this was very refreshing. It was the first professional conference I attend, and was very different compared to academic ones. A large percentage of speakers focused on specific companies and projects, to the point where it sometimes felt like advertising (and in a sense, it was)
There were presentations on a wide range of topics: type-oriented university programs, focusing on single characters (like accents or quotation marks), web fonts, the step-by-step development of a specific font, etc. It was interesting to see that, much like in other spheres, there is a very prevalent nostalgia on the “old-school”. This could be seen in the many lectures on traditional foundries and handmade fonts.
My two favourite talks were coincidentally about typography in Brazil. Lambe-lambe Letters by Catherine Dixon and Henrique Nardi went through the process of creating posters in a lambe-lambe printshop. The letters are carved out of wooden blocks and printed on wheat paste paper using a manual printer. The movies were compelling; it was captivating to see the process and how spacing is calculated by adding shims between the blocks. Brasilêro Project by Crystian Cruz was about the process of designing a font based on hand-lettered signage found in Brazilian cities. It was quite interesting to see a typeface that started on the streets end up in magazines, books, and the web.
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