The estimable Kathleen Tinkel, éminence grise of graphic-design and desktop-publishing criticism, wrote me the other week to say she’d seen a bizarre character-encoding problem in the headings of this blog. I checked (thoroughly, of course) and told her I didn’t see anything.

I’m sure she took that at face value and didn’t want to trouble me anymore. So she posted her complaints to a rather unrelated site, Desktop Publishing Forum.

She admits that she had, for some reason, deactivated one font after another in her system. Even though 30 cursive or script fonts are defined for h1 along with the required fallback of cursive, there isn’t a match on her system. That’s a fault with her system, which should map the generic cursive. [continue with: When you’ve got a problem with me, complain to me →]

One has finished (with) ATypI. The hard-to-type-and-pronounce acronym refers to the annual conference of the Association typographique internationale. I was here in 2003 (in Vancouver; ATypI is a place that is only coïncidentally sited with a city); couldn’t justify the cost to attend Helsinki, Prague, and Lisbon; and finally made it back to Brighton, with which I am becoming as familiar as, say, Greenwich Village or Bondi. That might be at least trivially impressive if I didn’t have to pay my own way. A lot of people did; many of us are freelancers. I just think I would win (lose) any contest of who took the biggest hit.

My summer had two parts: Fatmedia and ATypI. I had two presentations at two @smedia, which took ages to put together, rehearse, travel to, deliver, and return home from. I was hoping I could “relax” for June and work on a book you don’t know anything about, but no: I got a request to write something for the ATypI conference CD. Two weeks later, I realized I had doomed myself into writing the equivalent of a book chapter. It was all my fault, but it took another 2½ weeks. There was the spectre of somehow typesetting it and sending in a tagged PDF, but why, exactly, when I could just hand in my native HTML?

I thought I could take a break. But no! I had two presentations to write. There went the rest of the summer. It was that simple.

I know it was my idea. I said that already. I’m not complaining, I’m explaining.

Summer creeps up on you in Canada, or the Canada that isn’t Vancouver. It just barely gets warm enough to worry about having enough short-sleeved shirts and you suddenly realize it’s Pride Day and summer is one-third over.

En tout cas, my first presentation at ATypI went all right. Nobody laughed at the intended jokes. I had just the right number of slides and just the right degree of detail, I think, and according to people I asked. (I shook people down for thorough critiques.) There wasn’t much in the way of questions afterward. We all have mortal fear of no Q&A; it’s like a comedian dying onstage.

My second presentation, a few hours ago as I write this, went much better. But something always goes wrong in a presentation. What went wrong in the first one was having my script, which I never read verbatim, on the wrong side of me. This time I had everything set up right, but because my setup process was interrupted by yet another quest for the right video adapter, I forgot to plug in the computer. The screen kept “saving” itself, exactly as happened in my second-worst presentation ever. But the rest of it was fine, if not excellent. I think the pacing and photographs (some licensed from other people) were just right, though the latter looked like shite on the projector.

I will note that people laughed at inappropriate moments, as when I reported that the St. George signage test included people with low literacy, who were often students (that isn’t funny), and that the St. George prototype wrote out the names of subway-line colours for colourblind people (protans and deutans might not be able to differentiate yellow [“amber”] and green). I took people to task for such inappropriate laughter. (It’s my show; I can.)

I’ll wait till I get home to tell you more about the actual conference. But remember, if it weren’t for me there would be no coverage at all.

Tiffany Wardle & Miguel Sousa Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

(First slide credits everything to Kevlar and to James Sheedy, Pacific University, College of Optometry.)

The team I work in is multidisciplinary and combines knowledge from typographic experts, scientific experts, and engineering experts. The majority of the research was carried out by Jim Sheedy.

Eye fatigue is a problem. Survey of 4,068 computer workers: 40.5% experienced eye fatigue. (Done via a questionnaire: I get blurred vision; I close one eye when reading; I skip or repeat lines when reading; print starts to look blurry after I read for a while.) (At this point, Miguel Sousa gets up and walks away from my horridly invasive typing. Isn’t he married to Tiffany Wardle?) [continue with: Kevin Larson: ‘Better than a poke in the eye’ →]

Yes, it’s finally ready: “Inscribed in the Living Tile: Type in the Toronto Subway.” It’s 50 pages and 2 MB in size, so give it a while. (Shorter speaking-notes version upcoming.)

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

(The full title is “DIN 1451: The unofficial ‘corporate type’ of Germany?” I came in late.)

Gerrit Noordzij described a typographic universe. Everything inside it is good for body text; everything outside might be readable but that’s about it. My DIN is about here (bottom left).

Worked at Scangraphic (1987), URW (1991), Dutch Design, FarbTon, Dutch Design again. We look now at how many people work at larger companies, it’s nothing compared to the ’80s. Started my own studio.I had to become graphic designer, which I did. If I want to do larger jobs, it’s better to have a company, so we did a lot of corporate design. It turns out you can still make money doing type design, is I am practically a full-time type designer again. [continue with: Albert-Jan Pool: ‘DIN 1451’ →]

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

HOST: If you didn’t know who Matthew Carter was (applause) – well, even if you didn’t applaud, you use his fonts. Probably one of the last people to learn handcutting fonts professionally to designing font professionally. This is his 31st ATypI conference, so keep coming! And of course Bruce Rogers is one of our greatest historic sources for type and book design that I’ve admired.

CARTER: So we’re about “hands on” this time. (Had been talking about April Greiman.) Neville Brody said: “But she’s not hands-on,” and he said it in a very damning way. Bruce Rogers was very hands-on, a real meddler in everything he did. Born 1870, contemporary of Fred Goudy and Morris Benton and, in this country, of Edward Johnston, whose name comes up at this conference. From Indiana. Went to Purdue. Drew beautifully. First job after graduation was as illustrator for Indianapolis newspaper. Then Modern Art, where he saw a William Morris book, changing his interest away form pictorial illustration to the design of typography. Was hired by Riverside Press in Cambridge at only 26 to replace Berkeley Updike. Was the printing arm of Houghton Mifflin. [continue with: Matthew Carter: ‘Bruce Rogers and his Centaur type’ →]

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

Teaches at University of Washington. Type design is kind of an unusual subject, I think, in an all-purpose graphic-design program. You have tree hears with them after their freshman year, and most graphic designers do no end up designing working, usable fonts. Since you have such a limited time, it may seem impractical to teach them type design. With font programs getting so complex, it would be difficult to have a true type-design program with technical and æsthetic aspects. [continue with: Karen Cheng: ‘Teaching type in the city’ →]

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

(First several minutes untranscribed because of the crash of the piece-of-shit software I’m using, namely BBEdit, CopyPaste, Safari, and Mac OS X Tiger. The full title of the presentation is “From the Motor Car Act to motorways: British road signs from 1903–58.”)

Current British signs came about after a report and date back to 1960. (Shows many slides from 1938 and earlier. Mentions that one designer wanted to follow the British model of enumerating roads.) [continue with: Phil Baines: ‘From the Motor Car Act to motorways’ →]

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

(If you don’t know, Akira Kobayashi is type director at Linotype in Berlin – of course! Introduced by David Lemon, who also introduced Xurxo Insua.)

What I’m going to talk today is not too much into details or history of a sansserif type design, but it is about how we see, or how I see, or how I think when I design sansserif type.

(Shows photo of him with Zapf.) Since 2001 I’ve been living in Germany and working with two type giants, Hermann Zapf and Adrian Frutiger. This photo was taken in 2003 during the Zapfino Extra project. His Zapfino is still one of Linotype’s top-selling fonts. When I became interested in Latin type design when I first read his book was about 20 years ago. It was a small book called About Alphabets. I was working at a type-design department of a phototypesetting-machine manufacturer in Tokyo; I was obviously designing Japanese letters then. What I was doing was to design 20, 30 characters per day to design a complete Japanese font, which consists of usually 10,000 characters. So I was working as one of about 30 type designers.

And one day, feeling rather exhausted, I took a book in bookshelf in the design department. It was one of his books. So I became interested in Latin type design, and I kind of went to England to study calligraphy and typography. That was 1989. I may look older than that, but actually I am about 18 years old in the Latin world. [continue with: Akira Kobayashi: ‘Sansserif types and their humanistic backgrounds’ →]