TypeLab

Sponsored by
Type Network

The TypeLab at Typographics 2022 will host a series of informal work­shops, demos, inter­views, experiments, and more, June 16–18.

TypeLab is an informal, multi-day, typographic hackathon coordinated by Petr van Blokland to complement to the main Typographics conference and workshops. Like the original TypeLab events in the 1990s, it is a place for people to meet and talk about type and design with an informal structure that allows more spontaneity and interaction than typical mainstage conference events.

This year’s TypeLab will be a hybrid schedule, with a combination of in-person events in New York and online events around the globe, with hosts and participants livestreaming on three parallel channels:

TypeLab Americas

Hosted in person in NYC by Gen Ramírez and Zrinka Buljubašić.

TypeLab Europe

Hosted online by Petr van Blokland with Maarten Renckens

TypeLab Asia

Hosted online by Salomi Desai and Sirin Gunkloy

The typeface in the TypeLab header is 188 Sans from And Repeat.

Attending TypeLab

In-person TypeLab attendance, in NYC Streaming TypeLab events, online
Day 1
June 16*
Free and open to the public (no registration required) Free with streaming registration
Register for
streaming access
Day 2
June 17*
Open to attendees of the main Typographics conference (in-person conference registration required)
Day 3
June 18*

*The dates above are based on the time zone for NYC. See the detailed schedule below for dates and times adjusted to your current local time zone.

  • In-person TypeLab events will take place at 41 Cooper Square in NYC, just across the street from the Great Hall where the main Typographics conference will be taking place.
  • Streaming TypeLab events will be hosted on Zoom. Each of our 3 international hosts will manage their own separate Zoom meetings.
  • TypeLab participants are subject to our Code of Conduct & Policies. If you do not agree to these conditions, do not register or attend any TypeLab events.

TypeLab
Schedule

TypeLab events will proceed continuously, around the clock, for three full days.

Event programming will constantly evolve until the final event has ended, allowing for spontaneous alterations and additions as space and time allow.

The schedule is always very much subject to change at any time, without notice. For updates and announce­ments, join the Typographics mailing list and follow @TypographicsNYC on Twitter.

TypeLab Day 1

Starts , at  and ends , at 

Times are shown in your current time zone (EDT/UTC-4)

Colored symbols correspond to the livestream channel for each event:


Get yourself a coffee and croissant and come chat with us as we begin TypeLab Asia 2022. We’ll introduce ourselves and take you through the lineup of the next few days.


The presentation is about Ranjana Kutakshar, the monogram form of Ranjana Lipi, the national script of Nepal. Kutakshar was used in ancient times to encode messages to keep it secret from third parties. The presentation aims to inform viewers about the history, rules, uses and examples of Kutakshar used in archeological artifacts and in present times.


Hiragana is a group of phonograms that evolved from Kanji characters. In this video, our expert type designer shows how the letterforms of Hiragana transformed from Kanji by drawing all 46 characters.


Breakfast hangout: Introduction to TypeLab


Brush Lettering demo


A quick demo showing how shell scripts can help you make font build pipelines that are easy to set up, easy to extend, and stable over the long term. What are shell scripts, anyway? Anything you can run in the terminal (and this is more than you might think), you can write in a shell script to run again later. These scripts can sequence multiple command-line tools and Python scripts, name and organize files, and more. This allows you to set up some powerful but simple workflows – all without having to remember any special options in the terminal.


We created a survey to evaluate different graphic variants of Devanagari characters, interviewing hundreds of people gathering data and recommendations not only on the recognisability of each form of the Devanagari characters, but also on the preferences of readers and users.


Showing books


The Old Hungarian, also named as “Rovas Script” is one of the non-latin, runic looking writing system that was used before the adaptation of Latin in the Carpathian Basin. As a Type Designer I always found foreign scrips fascinating and exciting and I have decided to dig deeper in the legacy of this kind of type related heritage. There are not many proper (if any) typefaces out there with this script. My goal and vision is to bring it back to life and everyday usage by design and a little bit of morednization. Thankfully it’s been officially included into the Unicode system in 2016 and Thanks to Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer from Glyphs it is now also included within the software so it’s time to take this to the next level. I would like to briefly present my journey in this field and where I am at right now with illustrated slides and designs and typefaces I have made. Super excited to present it to the world!


In 21 years, the Tupigrafia magazine has published 13 issues, with 23 different covers. Each one shows a different logo, some with types or letterings created exclusively for the publication. Tupigrafia has featured more than 150 articles on typographic history and technology, type design, calligraphy and letterpress.


As a historically significant entrepôt located in Southeast Asia, one of Singapore’s twentieth-century graphic vernacular can be studied in greater detail by focussing on the range of san-serifs that graced signboards between the 1940s to 80s. We hope to take you on a photographic journey through institutional archives and our own documentation while peppering the talk with some of our musings and interpretations of letterforms as rendered by signmakers and sign painters and found along streets and arcades. As it turns out, these sans-serifs run a wide gamut and go beyond mere function!


Between 2019 and 2020 we were commissioned by Anna Kulachek to create a new wordmark for the oldest cinema theatre in Moscow “The Khudozhentvenny”. Creating a wordmark for the more than 20-character long name of a cherished cultural institution was a design challenge from the very start. More over the project rapidly turned into a custom typeface with an unconventional story.


The Allard Pierson is the museum and knowledge institute for the heritage collections of the University of Amsterdam Highlights include Moxon’s ‘Mechanick exercises’ from 1683 – the first printing manual –, 17th-c. Dutch calligraphy manuals by Jan van den Velde and Maria Strick, 19th-century lettering model books and type specimens, and the designer archives of Jan van Krimpen, Bram de Does and Gerrit Noordzij.


In this video interview, Richard Lipton shares advice gleaned from his storied career. From stitching together a self-education in type design to teaching the subject at RISD and from almost becoming a photographer to starting Lipton Letter Design, Richard offers insight from each stage of his life in letters.


Visual cryptography is one of the techniques used for encrypting messages. As the name suggests, messages are encrypted in a visual format such as images and typography. One of the best-known techniques involves breaking an image into parts, so that only someone with all the parts can decrypt the image. Some techniques also use typography as a tool, such as Turing Fonts where symbols of the fonts are unordered on purpose, Bacon Cipher which involves the usage of two typefaces, and Printer Steganography in which secret yellow dots are printed on paper encoding the details of the device a page was printed from.

This study is an exploration of how typography can facilitate visual cryptography. The result of this ongoing research are typefaces that are as much as a puzzle to solve, as they are a message to read. In plain sight these typefaces might look like random patterns but when looked closely they reveal the hidden message they carry. Such typefaces have a Pareidolia effect. Pareidolia is one such effect that falls into grey area between the encrypted and decrypted. It is an effect of perception we impose with a meaningful interpretation so that we see an object or meaning, when there is none. For example, a cloud might look like dinosaur, or the texture on a floor tile might be perceived as a face. Pareidolia can be used in visual cryptography where the letterforms and typography exist in the grey area of legibility and unreadable. By relaxing the constraints of legibility, I have created letterforms in a way that requires you to pay attention to them.

I used a programmatic method to create these fonts. As we have 0s and 1s in binary as elements and when a bunch of them put together in a structure i.e., in a line, a code is formed. In a similar way, I took basic shapes like circles and triangles as my elements and the structure became the grid using which I arrange these shapes. Methods of reading these messages such as either paying close attention, blocking the noise with a stencil key, combining all the broken parts or by morphing into another shape, can allow sharing secret messages out in the open via these fonts. They can act as an easter egg, an extra surprise for the devoted ones. As, these fonts are morphed and often broken into pieces to encrypt a message the applications of these fonts also bridge the physical and digital world, making a message more interactive to read.


A recent initiative of type foundry Universal Thirst - The Universal Thirst Gazette aims to encourage an active discussion and interest in type, in particular Indic type, providing resources for designers, researchers and students to learn more. It’s filled with essays, interviews and archive snippets. Gunnar and Salomi will be taking you through the motivation behind the project and open up the discussion on how to encourage the sharing of knowledge of this field today.


John will review a few typefaces designer’s text typefaces. Sign up and then send us your proofs for a chance to be selected for critique. Space is limited.

Be prepared to bring Roman & Italic proofs. The proof pdf should include a complete character set of U&lc, lining, and oldstyle figures & punctuations (diacritics not necessary). Also include body copy settings that are flush left at 8 pt, 10 pt, and 12 pt.


A tour of a personal newspaper collection that spans over two dozen countries and scripts, and more than three dozen languages, with a focus on publications from India, and the imaginative typographic styles featured on their nameplates.


With the support of the Dutch Cultural Funds for Design, a project by Tarek Atrissi Design (the Netherlands) and Al-Qalam foundation (Cairo) aimed at encouraging Arabic typographic experiments in Egypt: through research of graphic, calligraphic and lettering heritage and exploring it as inspiration for designing new Arabic typefaces. This talk will give an overview of this ongoing project in its research, educational and design components.


In 21 years, the Tupigrafia magazine has published 13 issues, with 23 different covers. Each one shows a different logo, some with types or letterings created exclusively for the publication. Tupigrafia has featured more than 150 articles on typographic history and technology, type design, calligraphy and letterpress.


I would like to present my work on my latest typeface, a Variable font called Koruption. The Koruption typeface is the result of a questioning I have been having about Variable fonts. Rather than using this new technology to navigate with traditional features like weight, width or slant, I wanted to explore how a regular typeface could be transformed into a decomposed, glitched version. This single weight font therefore offers a Variable axis that plays between a regular, straight style and a more expressive, destroyed version. But since a glitch is by nature unpredictable, I decided to also play with substitutions by creating 4 different glyphs for each letter. This creates a certain unpredictability in the letter forms that further enhances the overall effect. I would be very happy to share some animated or static examples to present the typeface but also the various applications issues these experiments has raised.


In depth look at a Typeface based on the premise that there are different ways we interact with text.


(Blaze Type is a partner of Type Network): we can either review portfolios from attendees or showcase our own work and talk more about our process, inspirations and type design as a whole! If we are to review attendees portfolio between 10 to 25 mins per people should be a fair time with each volunteers. Else we can do a presentation which can last between 30 mins to 1h if need be.


I would love to show and talk about my lettering project, that I am currently working on. It’s about words from Marathi language that I really like the sound of. The language being my mother tongue, I feel always had been and still is looked down upon. But, it’s a very interesting and extremely phonetic language. I wanted to bring that out. And so, I have been working on one word at a time. Currently, I clubbed it with the 36 days of type project.


Page through some of the newest arrivals in our collection – from early printing to Brazilian concrete poetry. Plus, get a preview of rare foundry ephemera on offer at the Typographics Book Fair. Live Q & A to follow pre-recorded tour.


We’ll go through interesting books while talking about them: —Fragment of the Prophetae minores. Handwriting on parchment. Italy, 6th century —Books printed by Viktor Hammer in several of his Uncial-type —Incunables by Nicolas Jenson and Jacobus Rubeus in type that inspired William Morris in his type design —Books from the Kelmscott Press —Manuscript by the renowned French calligrapher Nicolas Jarry, 1653 —Engraved books by Louis and Elisabeth Senault —Drawings by the German lettering artist Helmut Salden —Recently acquired drawings by Jan van Krimpen —Type drawings, etc. for the two typefaces made for the first Dutch private press, the Zilverdistel


Many Americans have probably seen Chop Suey fonts on Asian restaurant signs, takeout boxes and fortune cookies. It has a distinctive style of wedge-like shapes, and is supposed to invoke Chinese calligraphy. But if you grew up in China, chances are these fonts would be totally foreign to you. In this lecture, Raven Mo will analyze the Chop Suey font — an iconic design cliche that is a unique product of America’s relationship with China, its people and its cuisine. Raven will also unpack the history, deconstruct the design, and discuss the luxury of authentic cultural expression when fighting for basic human rights.


Kimya and DJR will share a bit about their recent collaboration on Fit Devanagari, a blocky display variable font that goes to extremes with little precedent in the Devanagari script. They’ll share how the rules of the Latin typeface had to change to meet the demands of the script, and how they decided to take the unusual step of issuing the font as a cross-foundry release.


Sol Matas and Nicole Dotin run Practica Program, a 14-week online type design course. Having witnessed numerous students tackle the type design process, many struggle with making decisions and often find themselves spinning in circles. Why does this happen? Is there a practical way to help students move forward and get back on track?


The Linotypes, once named the eighth wonder of the world by Thomas Edison, are not going to last forever. Aside the common issues when becoming older, their matrices, the molds with the letters imprinted in them, are prone to wearing out.

I’m working on new 3D printed matrices for the eighth world wonder. In this talk, I will first explain the strict frame to work within to design typefaces for those machines. Thereafter, I’ll share the status of the project and the issues we try to resolve.

Meanwhile, if you have a Linotype/Intertype, and you have a calligrapher, I can use your help.


The process of digitizing the world’s first typeface designed in prison, and finding deeper meaning in creative work. Featuring the work of the award-winning visual journalist Fevzi Yazıcı.


There is a rising (new) term in the field of typedesign. Let’s talk about »uniwidth« typefaces! First of all – from a user’s perspective: What does uniwidth mean? What is the difference to monospace? What are the advantages, and are there weak spots? We will explore use cases in print and web design. After that, I will add the typedesigner’s view on the topic: I will talk about my recent collaboration with Prof. Heitmann and our work on his uniwidth superfamilies, about technical obstacles and one of our main challenges: testing.


Don’t miss this opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at Poster House’s permanent collection! Led by Collections Manager Melissa Walker, this tour will explore type focused posters from the museum’s collection of over 10,000 posters from around the world.


Luciano Perondi and Giulio Galli will show how our foundry approaches customers’ expectations and discuss some custom faces such as Loacker Script, Sole Serif and Sole Sans. We’ll also introduce our consulting services and commercial opportunities, including testing licences for professionals and students.


The TypeLab space will have some 3D printers set up and the means to take your 2D vector files into the next dimension. This first of a few live demos will hopefully spark some interesting ideas. Conrad will be at TypeLab all 3 days to help you convert vector files in Rhino and print.


An illustrated and illuminating survey of how and why a 90-year-old typeface designed by a German refugee engraver became the typeface of David Bowie, Roy Lichtenstein and the City of London, and why it still appears on the jackets of thousands of British books every year.


Interview with Caroline de Lint and Andrea Fuchs about their project TYPEWALLS joined by some of the contributing designers. “From the loo to the lobby”, how typography and architecture meet and tell new stories in interior spaces. TYPEWALLS wants to be a platform for typedesigners to show their skills literally on a big scale: on wallpaper.


Design the process of designing quotes and plannings: how to get projects started, and even more important finished.


Tony DiSpigna will share a few words to introduce Douglas Davis’ short film celebrates world-renowned typographics master and distinguished professor Antonio Di Spigna’s 50-year career working and teaching and graphic design.

This origin story chronicles Tony’s humble beginnings as an Italian immigrant to Brooklyn in the sixties, follows his early years at New York City College of Technology, on to Pratt Institute, and ends with his lively career as a partner at the prestigious Lubalin Studio in Manhattan in the 1960s-70s.


Featuring interviews, Q&As (get your #dearalphabettes questions ready!), and maybe even a live performance or two, the Alphabettes Variety Show returns for some fun and a few surprises.


Page through some of the newest arrivals in our collection – from early printing to Brazilian concrete poetry. Plus, get a preview of rare foundry ephemera on offer at the Typographics Book Fair.


In-person 1:1 typeface design critiques


Soy mexicano. Crecí rodeado de gráfica vernácula, rótulos pintados a mano, y estilos con una estética singular. Empecé a diseñar tipografía casi de forma natural tomando la referencia de lo que me rodeaba día a día durante toda mi vida, que como punto de partida, mis primeros ejercicios y eventualmente mi forma de hacer tipografía y diseño se volvió parte de mis herramientas profesionales. A lo largo de mas de 20 años he hecho fuentes tipográficas y proyectos custom type, fuentes comerciales y para uso personal con un toque mexicano o completamente vernácular. Esta plática será un espacio de reflexión sobre cómo la identidad individual puede tomar sus propias raíces para hacer diseño.


This talk is about a typeface / lettering for the eye catching design by MVSA Architects for the new UvA Library building. While the building is still under construction, this talk shows the development of the 6 writing systems and 22 languages and how it should produce over a kilometer of type.


Diving into Twinline letter construction with a short presentation and small workshop to explore construction and letter texture.


How involvement with a volunteer-run microcinema in Brooklyn spurred a vocation as a type designer outside of a graphic design day job.


Hamilton’s type ranges from around 1850 to 2020. We’ll show gems from the collection rarely seen anywhere else from chromatic streamers to billboard size type. Sizes range from 24 pts. to 5 feet tall. We will print proofs during the demonstration.


Rio Carnaval is the biggest open air show on Earth. Colors, shapes, bodies and rhythms take up the Sambadrome and shake every molecule of one’s body. We’ve partnered with Brazilian branding agency Tatil to create a visual identity that dances to the rhythm of samba.


A brief overview of my experience and learnings about my process in a couple original projects I’ve worked on in the past year, and how keeping an open mind and experimenting to find exactly what I want to do has helped me look at type design in a different way.


Many Americans have probably seen Chop Suey fonts on Asian restaurant signs, takeout boxes and fortune cookies. It has a distinctive style of wedge-like shapes, and is supposed to invoke Chinese calligraphy. But if you grew up in China, chances are these fonts would be totally foreign to you. In this lecture, Raven Mo analyzes the Chop Suey font — an iconic design cliche that is a unique product of America’s relationship with China, its people and its cuisine. We will unpacks the history, deconstructs the design, and discusses the luxury of authentic cultural expression when fighting for basic human rights.


Sketchbook tour. An experiment using CalArts sketchbook’s style and techniques applied to letters sketch to overcome a letterblock.


Type, lettering, and calligraphy can produce a variety of forms and textures, but this variety is constrained by the shapes of the script you’re working with. There is a wider world of possible written forms, encompassing the visual diversity of every writing system from the past, present, and future. By inventing new writing systems, you can explore this world without being limited by the languages you know.

I will share some works that have inspired me, and I will present some writing systems I have designed. Most of my systems represent the English language, but they do so in completely different ways that give each system a unique visual character. Moreover, different systems feel different to write in, lending themselves to different use cases and states of mind.

I’ll describe a structure for thinking about experimental writing systems, which you can use as a guide for creating your own. Participants will have a chance to design writing systems, share their work, and exchange ideas.

TypeLab Day 2

Starts , at  and ends , at 

Times are shown in your current time zone (EDT/UTC-4)

Colored symbols correspond to the livestream channel for each event:


We have some surprise guests joining us for breakfast! Come online to discover who they are, and have a chat with us as we start day two of TypeLab Asia


Having the influence from different culture shocks in Hong Kong, designers Sunny Yuen and Roger Ng will share the stories behind their works related to traditional Chinese culture, indie music, or social movement.


Young generation of type designers from Cadson Demak showing books they love.



EsadType is a public, international, free typeface design postgraduate course offered by the School of Art & design of Amiens, France. As it will reach its 15th year in welcoming and training people from all around the world, this presentation will reflect on its history and share a glimpse of the projects currently in development with the 2021-23 group. We will also preview what’s coming in September for the next session!


Breakfast


A panel discussion to exchange thoughts among typography teachers from different schools of thought and processes.


Show your bookshelves!


I try to build an experimental mind bending software to design multidimensional fonts faster.


A showcase of Zeenat’s Urdu type expressions where she explores and experiment with different tools and mediums. Using tongue-in-cheek humour and wit, combined with the use of scale and varied print making methods, Zeenat is working towards reinventing possibilities of how the script can be a part of regular day to day life. 


This past April, Type Network held a webinar about designing with variable fonts, featuring these 4 prerecorded presentations from Rodrigo Saiani of Plau Design, David Jonathan Ross of DJR, Lynne Yun and Kevin Yeh of Space Type, and the team at Underware.


In 2018, Céline Hurka released Alfarn and Hidetaka Yamasaki created CarlMarx, as part of the Adobe Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau Project. CarlMarx is a typeface based on a lettering sketch (lettering practice in a lecture) from 1932 by Carl Marx, a painter (Bauhaus student at that time). Hide is now working on the expansion of CarlMarx – adding a handwritten style to both weights. The previous version of CarlMarx was drawn with clean, straightforward Beziér curves, whereas the new version is created from scanned data of handwriting. Céline is currently expanding Alfarn with a brand new lowercase. Alfarn is based on a hand-lettered poster by Alfred Arndt from 1923.


While questioning global design history and the inspiration overload on the internet, we as Latin Americans have found clues through collectivity and paying attention to what surrounds us. From vernacular typography to historical visual heritage we aim to enrich the typographic landscape by rethinking it in a modern context.


This spring, Alfarn 2 and CarlMarx Handwriting have been released, as updates to Adobe’s “Hidden Treasures Bauhaus Dessau” project. Céline and Hide will take this opportunity to reflect on their work, share their individual processes, and tell us what they learned along the way. This (live) session will be moderated by Frank. To best prepare for this best event, make sure to watch the video from TypeLab 2021.


FontGoggles explained


Come for a virtual visit of our Berlin studio, check out some of our typographic collections and see some of our favourite books & specimens!


This will include a short introduction to the script, followed by a demo of how to draw companions. Viewers / zoom participants are encouraged to sketch along and interact. Bring a print out with the word “OHhangers” on it in a font of your choice, and for which you would want to draw a devanagari companion for.


When designing a variable font, it’s critical to understand the intermediate spaces of interpolation. It’s also often helpful to explore new territory via extrapolation, or to generate intermediates for new support sources. Skateboard is a powerful RoboFont extension that can help with all this and more, and an important part of the toolset I use to design and build variable fonts. In this lecture, I’ll demonstrate several ways I’ve found it useful in my projects.


Production Type will give a studio tour, and share sneak previews about what’s cooking at the foundry.



Sketching the process of large projects, alternating sketching, drawing and coding on a narrow time line.


Show your bookshelves!


If you design type, you won’t want to miss Peter’s demo of Font Proofer—a powerful new tool for generating proofs. Font Proofer has an intuitive UI for creating an assortment of proof layouts, editing repetitive spacing strings, and exporting PDFs. It’s fast, highly customizable, and compatible with both Glyphs and RoboFont. http://fontproofer.com.


This talk will discuss the process and outcomes of two projects that explore creating Algorithmic Arabic type Artifacts, through custom designed tools.

Flickering Fragments, features the first fully implemented segmented LED Arabic typeface, that imagines an alternative past of vintage clocks and pocket calculators to include Arabic. It was developed by xLab, a research and development studio exploring the creative potential of computation and technology. Founded in 2020 in Doha, Qatar, the lab has developed innovative tools and products related to post-digital printmaking, LED lighting technology, and Arabic calligraphy.

Type+Code, features robotic calligraphic prints by Graphic Design students from the Type+Code elective course at VCUArts Qatar in Fall 2021. It was taught by Levi Hammett and Ryan Browning in collaboration with xLab. This studio explores lettering and calligraphy as a post-digital craft. Students extend their creative practice to work within the tension between precise programming of robotic motion control (CNC) and the unpredictability of physical mark making using basic calligraphy tools within the tradition of printmaking.


Some live coding in RoboFont


We will introduce and demonstrate our “Fontra” work-in-progress: a new web-based font editor platform concept. Keywords: collaborative editing, variable fonts, variable components.


Just like our societies, typefaces are made from what we learned from the past. We are constantly building upon what have been done before. The last decades allowed a lot more experimentations in typography, and even more recently (still?) there was a huge re-interest in ‘Grotesk’ letterforms… I will describe the design process of a ‘Didot’ typeface I started two years ago, explaining it’s contention between new/old and how I tried to find a balance between two worlds.


Existing variable font tools can help us with inspection, proofing and generating instances — but what about more dynamic use cases? We’ll talk about our new tool, Vartype, and how you can generate kinetic, interactive, and fully-adjustable sketches for your variable fonts with the click of a button. (https://vartype.com)


Tired of managing variable font glyph substitutions using text in .designspace files or Glyphs.app bracket layers? Nic Schumann and Marie Otsuka will present a demo of the Variable Font Visualizer, an open source web-based tool we developed to help managing complex FeatureVariations – glyph substitutions records – across the design-spaces of multi-axis variable fonts.


Tiffin (by Salomi Desai): A Latin and Devanagari typeface for literary magazines Ploquine (by Emma Marichal) : An interactive typeface family with influences from woodtype. You can find more details on the EsadType website : postdiplome.esad-amiens.fr


As the sole designer at Pushpin Group Inc with Seymour Chwast, Camille Murphy works with Mr. Chwast to layout and design his many book projects and proposals. At age 90, Mr. Chwast has completed over 24 proposals and published 8 books in the past three years! Most notably in this role, Camille created the book mechanicals for “Hell, The People and Places” published by Corraini Edizioni in Italy, and “Arno and the Mini-Machine” published by Seven Stories Press, and others.

In this presentation, Camille will share with you advanced tips and tricks for setting up a press-ready book mechanical in Adobe InDesign.


When designing a variable font, it’s critical to understand the intermediate spaces of interpolation. It’s also often helpful to explore new territory via extrapolation, or to generate intermediates for new support sources. Skateboard is a powerful RoboFont extension that can help with all this and more, and an important part of the toolset I use to design and build variable fonts. In this lecture, I’ll demonstrate several ways I’ve found it useful in my projects.


A brief trip back to the 80s to review what it was like to count characters for cold type, use dry transfer, and get familiar with funky fonts. Coming without acid-washed jeans or a Walkman is okay, but please come willing to participate. Typographers just want to have fun. This event is in-person only.


Some live coding in RoboFont


A demonstration of how we used Drawbot to develop a script to generate custom branding visuals.


On how to and why to use Javascript and WebGL to create live generative graphics taking Tosh Physarum as illustration (https://tosh.black-foundry.com/).

TypeLab Day 3

Starts , at  and ends , at 

Times are shown in your current time zone (EDT/UTC-4)

Colored symbols correspond to the livestream channel for each event:



Show your bookshelves! Pick a favourite book or two and tell us something about it. Or show us your studio and home bookshelves to get an insight into what you love to read.


“Do you know that letterforms are not just communication tools but are a form of expression and emotion? Let me take you through the process and the behind the scene of visualising and creating expressive Tamil letterforms to sway your imagination.”


Since 2020, Thailand has been going through countless protests led by youths calling for monarchy reform. Typography and type design have become one of the most effective tools for delivering political messages in both online and offline. Moreover, the recent BKK governor election held for the first time in the past 7 years involved an interesting example of typographic design use in Thailand’s political canvassing. The remarkable political phenomena encompass such an interesting type design implementation that we would like to share with the international typographic community.


Devanagari script has a dominant presence in embodying the visual and cultural discourse of the North-Indian subcontinent. A lot of this can be attributed to Hand-painted street signages, Stencil Letterings, Truck letterings, calligraphic practices, block printing etc. In this presentation we try to pickup visual cues from these practices and develop the same into visual grammar for Type-Design. Case Study: Katekar Font ( glyphic Devanagari typeface inspired by hand painted street signages ) & Indus Stencil (Stencil Devanagari typeface inspired by Instructional utilitarian Signs in Mumbai’s Local train and Buses)


Breakfast hangout at the Royal Academy|


The Allard Pierson is the museum and knowledge institute for the heritage collections of the University of Amsterdam Highlights include Moxon’s ‘Mechanick exercises’ from 1683 – the first printing manual –, 17th-c. Dutch calligraphy manuals by Jan van den Velde and Maria Strick, 19th-century lettering model books and type specimens, and the designer archives of Jan van Krimpen, Bram de Does and Gerrit Noordzij.


Hiragana is a group of phonograms that evolved from Kanji characters. In this video, our expert type designer shows how the letterforms of Hiragana transformed from Kanji by drawing all 46 characters.


We’ll go through interesting books while talking about them: —Fragment of the Prophetae minores. Handwriting on parchment. Italy, 6th century —Books printed by Viktor Hammer in several of his Uncial-type —Incunables by Nicolas Jenson and Jacobus Rubeus in type that inspired William Morris in his type design —Books from the Kelmscott Press —Manuscript by the renowned French calligrapher Nicolas Jarry, 1653 —Engraved books by Louis and Elisabeth Senault —Drawings by the German lettering artist Helmut Salden —Recently acquired drawings by Jan van Krimpen —Type drawings, etc. for the two typefaces made for the first Dutch private press, the Zilverdistel


  1. The compatibility of fonts and symbols using on cross-script apps.
  2. How to determine default line spacing of apps?
  3. The influence that setting default Chinese font height might bring.
  4. Advices for the design of UI text layout

Journey from Lettering to Tamil font making


On the occasion of its 15th anniversary, the independent type foundry TypeTogether has published a book entitled Building ligatures: the power of type. It presents a cross section of knowledge, experience, and best practices in type design, typography, and graphic design. Moreover, it provides a sound framework to discuss the role of the modern type foundry, the challenges faced by independent companies, and the possibilities that open up for collaboration in the fields of education and new media.


This year’s TypeMedia students will show some of their graduation work, the process and results.


Anek is an award winning multi-script variable type family that supports ten commonly-used scripts in India. This robust type family was an exercise in multiplicity, multiple scripts in multiple weights and widths by multiple designers. In this panel discussion, five designers of different scripts go behind the scenes to reflect on the inspirations and hurdles during the collaborative process of creating Anek.


Join Glyphs team member Rainer for a special announcement.


Page through some of the newest arrivals in our collection – from early printing to Brazilian concrete poetry. Plus, get a preview of rare foundry ephemera on offer at the Typographics Book Fair. Live Q & A to follow pre-recorded tour.


Give us your glyphs files and we will devour them and show to the world what you could have done differently. Matteo and Rainer will dissect your file, live in front of everybody watching. Like a type crit, but with .glyphs files, and useful insights in font production. Hint: anonymize your .glyphs files first and send them to res at glyphsapp period com, subject ‘online type crit’. This is the online alternative to the in-person Glyphs File Crit, see the program for details.


There is a difference between speech and text. Text seems to express a monotonous voice, while the voice continuously carries variations in the loudness, duration and pitch. In this presentation, I will do a showcase of what is already done with type to make text more expressive. In a comparison, I found out that most users of type use similar techniques to visualise speech expression. I summarised this in the expressive reading axes, a framework to develop reading materials supporting reading expressively in an intuitive way.


Join us for some type quizzes, music and conversation as we close TypeLab Asia 2022. Bring a drink and snack and come hangout!


Have you ever considered that many of the major developments in type consisted of unintended consequences of other innovations?


Give us your glyphs files and we will devour them and show the world what you could have done differently. Matteo and Rainer will dissect your file, live in front of everybody watching. Like a type crit, but with .glyphs files, and useful insights in font production. Hint: anonymize your .glyphs files first and send them to res at glyphsapp period com, subject ‘in-person type crit’, or put them on a memory stick. This is the in-person alternative to the online Glyphs File Crit, see the program for details.


A research progress update on my project which studies intention in images of people in 20th-century print production advertising.


I’ll talk about some of my works, Ukrainian type design heritage and work in Ukraine during the war.


A 2-hour online workshop for lettering artists and typographers about the conventions of effective application of color. Learn about chromatic effects such as outlines, interior outlines, shades and cast shadows, highlights, centerlines, prismatic modeling, convex illusions, and filigree. You’ll need a soft pencil, eraser, ruler, black ballpoint pen, tracing paper, copier paper, an artist’s color wheel, STAEDTLER 364 WP8 Textsurfer Classic Highlighter Pen, Sharpie 38250PP Permanent Marker 5.3mm Chisel Tip Assorted 8/Set, Adobe Illustrator.


Studio tour with neon sign maker Evan Voyles of The Neon Jungle. Having made over 500 signs lighting up the streets of Austin, TX, Evan shares his story of writing letters in lights. Framed in metal and glass, his signs are both theatrical and functional with the sole job of getting you to look and step inside the store. So stop on by and say hello.


A personal story about a film and a font.


In this mini-workshop, the attendees will gain a brief overview of Devanagari letterforms. With the help of reference models, they will be drawing companions for existing Latin Fonts or Latin companions for Devanagari fonts. The participants are most welcome to explore other scripts as well, although my range of critique might be limited to Devanagari and Latin. Further, sketching tools such as TypeCooker will be explored, and along with one-on-one feedback, the participants will (hopefully) acquire a deeper understanding of drawing companion letterforms for two (or more) scripts. Bring your favorite sketching materials. This workshop won’t be online, only in-person.


The pen is something you can pick up and hold in your hand. Whereas previously the correlation between type design and calligraphy was one of shared practices, today the correlation is one of theory. Bolstered by the teachings of Gerrit Noordzij and since diluted and oversimplified, broad-edged and pointed pens have become abstractions in discussions among non-calligraphers that are as meaningful as dancing about architecture.

This discussion seeks to broaden the perspective of writing tools by grounding them in real-world application—both by examining historical evidence and by observing current practices. Doing so will not only better inform one’s approach to the design of letters, but it will keep type designers from sounding so damn ridiculous when they talk about calligraphy.


In depth look at a Typeface based on the premise that there are different ways we interact with text.


In 21 years, the Tupigrafia magazine has published 13 issues, with 23 different covers. Each one shows a different logo, some with types or letterings created exclusively for the publication. Tupigrafia has featured more than 150 articles on typographic history and technology, type design, calligraphy and letterpress.


This presentation outlines an atypical path to becoming a type designer. From attaining a bachelor’s degree in social science to working in broadcast news to becoming a type designer, the talk aims to show that type designers do not all follow the same path to the craft. Having a broad range of experiences prior to becoming a type designer can be an asset. Questions from the audience are welcomed and encouraged!


Proyecto de tesis de pre grado que abarca el proceso de creación de un curso masivo abierto en línea (MOOC) en español enfocado a Tipografía web y avalado por la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Cumple con el objetivo de desarrollar un recurso que complemente la educación en tipografía para tratar y profundizar en temas que usualmente solo se abordan a nivel introductorio.


Torneo tipográfico” is an online event started in 2020. The tournament produced 8 collaborative typefaces and a series of team competitions. We will share some results, experiences and learnings from last year’s tournament, as a way to create community through friendly competition, teaching and learning.


A complete character set for more than 60 native Mexican indigenous languages


Details behind printingfilms.com along with a screening of a personal favourite film from the collection.


Unqualified advice on love and (visual) relationships. Can you pair a tall ascender with a short descender? How much space is too much space? Are too many contextual alternatives a sign of commitment aversion? Is my obsession with punctuation unhealthy?


Dig into the design of the winter olympics that never happened: Denver 76. It is the only time the olympics have been rejected after being assigned and were designed by the Denver office of UNIMARK - an agency headed by Massimo Vignelli and others.


Streaming
Registration

Registration for streaming online access to the 2022 TypeLab is now open. Thanks to the continued support of our sponsors and collaborators, streaming access is free of charge.

Registration for streaming online access to the TypeLab is separate from the main conference, workshops, or book fair. You must register for those events separately.

Please note: TypeLab participants are subject to our Code of Conduct & Policies. If you do not agree to these conditions, do not register or attend any TypeLab events.


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