First Dispatch from TypeCon 2004
Yesterday was my first taste of TypeCon 2004 — the conference proper hasn’t even begun yet, and it has already exceeded my expectations.
First of all, I had no idea how many people would be here. I’m continually surprised at the number of dedicated type geeks there are in the world; I thought at most there would be a couple hundred attendees (with such an extensive speaker list, it seemed to me not unreasonable that the speakers might actually outnumber the rest of the attendees). I think the actual number is approaching the capacity of 500. Fantastic!
Since I’m more a type enthusiast and not really a type designer (though it would be nice to branch into that as a hobbyist at some point), my main interest in the conference is a bit more personal than professional: in the past two years I’ve become acquainted with a lot of other enthusiasts as well as some of the best designers working today, and TypeCon was an opportunity to meet many of them in person. So far I’ve met about a dozen of my Typographica/Typophile cohorts, and these people just couldn’t be nicer.
This is not to say I don’t have professional goals with this conference: there are so many opportunities to learn from the masters of this wide-ranging field, I can’t wait to get down to the actual conference, which begins tomorrow. Being a single-track conference, for the most part, means I won’t really miss anything (except for the 8:30am sessions, which I need to review, because it would take an earth-shattering topic to get me on our local subway system at 7:30am on a Friday, and you can just forget about Saturday and Sunday).
There are a number of pre-conference workshops happening this week. Yesterday I was in an all-day workshop yesterday learning the nuts and bolts of FontLab, which is emerging as the industry-standard font-design software over the apparently no-longer-supported Fontographer. The workshop was worthwhile in its introduction to the program, especially how you can program OpenType features into your fonts. Adam Twardoch was supposed to be there to help teach the workshop, but he had visa problems and so was stuck in Germany, I believe, videoconferencing. Let’s just say that the California College of the Arts is not hanging out at the forefront of teleconferencing technology, but straining to hear Adam’s talk provided certain rewards.
At the workshop I was thrilled to meet Stuart Sandler, who has a brand-new collection of fonts, and Brian Jaramillo, aka BJ Harvey, who’s launching a new agency and gave me a beautiful type-specimen book. We also ran into Stephen Coles, who, it turns out, had a fake picture as his Typophile icon all this time. Plus on Monday I had the honor of shuttling one of my fellow Typophiles, Tiffany Wardle, from the airport to the hotel. I know this all sounds like Hemingway-style name-dropping, but man, it was cool to meet all these people I’ve only known online!
Last night was “Type High,” a well-attended meet-and-greet/lecture with various type foundries, including Psy/Ops, FontShop, FontBoy, and a number of others.
The main program last night began with David Peters showing a collection of film title sequences from the 60s, including Pablo Ferro’s Dr. Strangelove, Saul Bass’s work on Psycho and a couple of other films, as well as a couple of James Bond films. The highlight of that presentation was clearly Art Clokey’s titles for How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. Clockey, the creator of Gumby, made a magnificent clay-animation sequence for that film, and it was by far the crowd favorite.
Next, Jared Benson and Joe Pemberton of Typophile presented a brief preview of the Typophile Film Festival, which will show tonight. The J-boys put together a spectacular intro with the help of one of their friends whose name escapes me at the moment. They also showed the trailer for my new movie, which was really fun to see on a big screen.
The main event of the evening was a talk by Victor Moscoso, which pretty much covered the entirety of his life and career. He’s one of the preeminent psychedelic poster artists from the 60s. Very warm and humorous person, with a lot of interesting work to show, though it turned out to be quite a long presentation, and no one had had anything to eat since lunch.
About two dozen of us ended up at a cafe down the street well past midnight, and Sarah and I had to go home at that point — the conversations likely continued far into the night.
More dispatches tomorrow — probably briefer, as I don’t know how I’d have typed this all out on the Treo. I can’t wait for the big event tonight — type-design awards and a reception courtesy of Linotype, a discussion with Erik Spiekermann, and the film festival.
Comments:
Cheshire Dave, this is so wonderful! If you see Stephen Coles again, send him my love and admiration.
Keep blogging! This is really great!
Thanks a bunch for the updates Chesh!
I am missing it this year, but I’ll be back. It is great meeting all those people yea?
Please let us know where next years Con will be as soon as they announce it.
Have a ball, and make sure if they have a dance, go. It is a hoot to see typographers dance! Ha, ha! “What happens at TypeCon, stays at TypeCon.”
Attending vicariously through you,
S.