My next speaking engagement – I still have those, as it turns out – is at the biggest and most prestigious annual typography conference, ATypI. This year it’s in Brighton (“The Acceptable Face of England), September 12–16. I was there in Vancouver in ’03, but the locations chosen for subsequent AsTypI, like Helsinki, cost more to fly to than Sydney. (A shame, really. Like Tyler Brûlé, I am at once an australophile and a nordiphile. Having been to Iceland, it’s one down, four to go.)
I think I’m the only person giving two papers at ATypI, which appears to be the result of strings being pulled behind the scenes, which I appreciate.
- Wednesday, September 12, 11:30 (at Upcoming)
- “Don’t show printouts to grannies and call that a test: Some scenarios for testing TV screenfonts”
- Further debunking of the junk science behind Tiresias Screenfont, and some new, original directions for research and testing into caption and subtitle fonts.
- Sunday, September 16, 11:30 (when everybody but me will be hung over; at Upcoming)
- “Inscribed in the living tile: Type in the Toronto subway”
- Whirlwind tour of everything that’s right and wrong with typography in the TTC. A cheat sheet so you can follow along in the audience: Right – original subway font. Wrong – pretty much everything else.
I’ll be liveblogging all the other sessions I attend, and I expect that, yet again, I’ll be the only one doing so. By default all sessions will be videotaped and posted online later, though the organizers have unwisely made it possible to opt out of that. It will be a rather interesting discussion about posting a video podcast of a lecture about captioning without captions, and another interesting discussion to decide what font to use for them if and when captions are provided.
I’ve also asked that audio-only be published. I would assume that, unlike with @media, the podcasts will not be selectively and peevishly edited after the fact, like airbrushing apparatchiks out of a Kremlin balcony photo.
I’ll publish my usual notes and additionally, in the TTC case, a 60-page, 16,000-word, 50-illustration, 70-citation research paper that reveals what really happened with Paul Arthur’s signage redesign, among other things. (I’m really pushing the limits of print CSS with that one.) Nobody from TTC will be there, and the entire organization will pretend that my lecture and research paper never took place. The gig will be up, but they’ll be in denial. Swiss 721 all around.
These presentations are a big deal, they come at an inopportune time, and I’ve been working like a dog all summer on them. Yes, that was my summer: Unpaid work on “academic” projects. And no goddamned business whatsoever.
En tout cas, to generate megaexcitement around these upcoming engagements, today I begin a series of postings on the theme of “14 Days to ATypI.” It’ll be two separate streams of a factoid per day, one for captioning and one for subway type. Due to the staggered presentation dates, they begin and end on different days. The captioning theme starts today (all posts: captioning theme; TTC theme).