The ATypI President and two board members say what ATypI conferences mean to them
Welcome!
I am thrilled to welcome you to the 68th Atypi Conference. 68 years! What a legacy, and you hold a place in my heart and a special place in Typography History.
Typography, research and design are solitary occupations, as our founders were well aware and Atypi was established as a place to exchange ideas, collaborate and honestly wax poetically about numbers and letters in a way most would not understand.
ATypI is still that place… a community of gifted and talented individuals waxing poetically about numbers and letters, kerning, spacing, a sprinkling of coding and language preferences thrown in… these conversations happen over breakfast, a steaming cup of coffee, in a corner discussing the exhibitions or on a roof top pointing out how elegant a ligature is in the distance.
Each conference I have attended has been magical, from my first in Vancouver, where a motley crew assembled at the Seattle airport, where I was handed the keys and was told “You do this border thing all the time, you drive” to Dublin, where I had to go back, because I didn’t know if it was the city that I loved or the 200 friends I had at the conference.
All I know is after 22 years my favorite ATypI conference is always the next one and this year is no different (but they will have a hard time pushing Brisbane out of the top spot) Copenhagen, I am looking forward to meeting you and spending time with my favorite people, who after all this time I consider family.
See you soon!
Carima El-Behairy
ATypI Board President, Buffalo, New York, United States
ATypI conferences are great. They’re lots of fun, and when you get home there’s a warm afterglow; you’re full of excitement for new directions of creative enquiry and career possibilities. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about the benefits of ATypI conferences in the longer term and, with the clarity which can only come from the passing of time, offer some personal insights into where this value lies. And I am increasingly convinced that the intangible benefits of conferences are more valuable than the tangible ones.
Let me start by listing the three conferences I have attended; Hong Kong 2012, Antwerp 2018 and Brisbane 2024. There is a six-year gap between each. That’s six long years of watching conferences unfold on social media, having serious FOMO, and waiting patiently until the conference talks are released online some months later.
Why the six-year gaps? It’s simple. I live in Australia.
Let me backtrack a little. When I decided to pursue type designm there was nowhere to study it in Australia. Such a thing simply didn’t exist. Nor was online study, which we take for granted today. I’m talking the mid 1990s which, in Australia, was pre-internet, or at least the early days of dial-up modems. As a result, my knowledge was piecemeal. I did my best to fill the gaps with books and discussion forums, but there was always a gnawing sense of insufficiency. I was, geographically, so far removed from the historical centres of typography that I always felt like an imposter in any conversation about type.
That all began to change in 2012, when I attended ATypI Hong Kong – the first one anywhere near my part of the world. For some years prior to 2012 I had been aware of Gerry Leonidas’ program at The University of Reading and, when I discovered he was also at the conference, I cornered him to ask questions. In retrospect, it was more out of hope than any real expectation that I would ever be able to actually study at Reading, but my boldness was rewarded. Gerry revealed that part-time study was in fact part of Reading’s plans for the future. He was patient with my questions and answered them with enthusiasm and detail and, in the process, ensured I would be among the first to enrol when available. Had I never attended that conference, I never would have gained the nuanced context that only a face-to-face conversation can offer, and I would probably have continued to feed my uncertainty forever more.
Back in Australia, I was forced to wait several more years before the option to study at Reading finally became available and, fortuitously, attend my second ATypI conference; Antwerp 2018. Having just returned from an expensive overseas trip, an email arrived in my inbox. Reading’s MResTD was taking enrolments for a two-year program including three visitation periods of two weeks each. It was perfect and, despite having just spent every cent I owned, I signed up immediately. Gerry sensibly timed one of the visitation periods with the conference in Antwerp.
I subscribe to the view that, while speaker presentations are undoubtedly the core of a conference, the side conversations and interactions are often more important. In Antwerp I met luminaries such as Matthew Carter and Gerard Unger, along with countless type designers from all over the world. I met the makers of the software that I use professionally every single day. I gained invaluable context about the workflows, methodologies and struggles of people who do the same thing as I do. I attended several workshops which had a direct and immediate impact on the quality of my work, such as one by Aleksandra Samulenkova on designing diacritics. I also fulfilled a lifetime ambition by visiting the Plantin-Moretus museum, where I was stunned to see the oldest printing press still in existence. All of this stuff, when mooshed together, forms an experience which cannot possibly be matched by any book, website or online video.
In the six years since Antwerp 2018 I have graduated as a Reading alumni and become more involved with the ATypI organisation, joining as a board member in 2023. I was lucky enough to be involved when ATypI brought the conference to Australia for the first time, in Brisbane in 2024. There is a legitimate pride in being the host country, and it was wonderful to see ATypI fulfilling its charter to bring typographic expertise to regions beyond the traditional activity centres of Europe and America. This is no mean feat; it’s very difficult and expensive to run an international conference, and it would be easy to justify overlooking the far-flung regions.
Unfortunately, I am unable to attend this year’s event in Copenhagen (is the six-year cycle beginning again?) and, already, I am experiencing the seven stages of grief starting with FOMO and ending with, well, more FOMO. How I’d love to cycle the streets like a European, visit a museum, or just wander the streets eating pastries and looking at buildings. How I’d love to learn in the company of others at the ATypI talks and workshops. How I’d love to just soak it all up.
And so I make a heartfelt, direct appeal to all Copenhagen attendees: please walk up to a random conference attendee and start a conversation.
Do it for me. I promise, it will be worth your while.
Wayne Thompson
ATypI Board Member, Australia
Living as a “type activist”
My professional type career started in 1999 in Nancy, France, at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), where I made lifelong friends and tutors. In those years, at the beginning of the internet, the Atelier was in charge of Peter Keller in the cellar of the beautiful Beaux Arts school.
When I entered ANRT, it was the end of four years of living in Paris. I was eager to learn and grow, and the ANRT was, for me, the “icing on the cake”—some of the best years of my life. Et bien sûr je parle français!
After my time at ANRT, I returned to México in 2001 and tried to find my way in the editorial design field. I’m proud to say I’m part of the first generation of trained Mexican typographers. After all these years, I’ve also designed some successful typefaces. I made them more as a challenge and never made an economic profit from them. I became an editor, educator, and researcher, all of which can summarize me as being a “type activist.”
My first ATypI congress was in 2009 in México. I was part of the organizing committee that made possible Typ09, “The Heart of the Letter.” Those were very busy days. The organizing committee worked extremely hard to welcome the international community; we were excited. At that time, the Mexican-type scene was very young, and we were still figuring out how to handle the “type thing.”
The great day arrived, and I remember meeting a lot of type heroes for the first time.
In those days, the internet didn’t exist and was not needed for these kinds of events. Nevertheless, I remember feeling a bit stressed. As far as I recall, everything went smoothly and, on the last day, we all finished in a ballroom: Salón Los Ángeles, where we had great fun! It was a great, popular venue to close a great event.
In my professional career, I’ve exercised my typographic knowledge in special projects. That’s the case for the book “El Chilam Balam de IxIL,” a beautiful facsimile book written in Maya that needed to be transcripted and translated into Spanish. For the first time, I used a typeface designed for Maya called Mayathan (designed by Andre Gürtler and a team of Mexican students) in the pre-era of OpenType technology. I had the chance to present this project at ATypI Amsterdam (2013). For me, this presentation would become a premonition of the need and importance of developing typefaces for original languages or minorities we are experiencing worldwide today.
While in Amsterdam, I had the chance to see some of my friends from ANRT and meet new ones, like Alice Savoie and Sandrine Nugue, just to mention a few, and meet Thomas Huot Marchand, the current director of the school.
The thrill of ATypI is about participating in the lectures, hanging out with friends, drinking a beer, and hearing and exchanging experiences of the projects they are working on.
Then, the pandemic fell on the world. During those years of confinement, I followed the online events organized by ATypI (Tech Talks 2020–2022), and I studied a master’s. At one of these events, I presented online about my Wikitype project. I must confess that the effect of presenting, no matter what, online is nothing compared to doing it in person, as I was supposed to do in Paris in 2023. Sadly, I couldn’t attend ATypI Paris to present my project because of a passport issue in my country. That was so disappointing because I was really excited about seeing my old friends in France and visiting one of my most beloved cities in the world… encore une fois!
The truth is that I would love to travel more and see the type friends I’ve made through the years. But living in México is not always easy. The FOMO is always present, and the only way for me to compensate for this is to try to follow strategic conferences, foundries, and people. Honestly, the best experience is to personally attend ATypI‘s conferences.
This year, I’m part of the board of this Association that I studied when doing research for my master’s. ATypI is almost seventy years of commitment, offering a space to type lovers and type professionals around the world to share their research, discoveries, and stories related to type worldwide. ATypI is a state-of-the-art event.
I will not be able to go to Copenhagen this year, but I feel happy to be able to contribute to the board. I miss seeing my type folks in a new city. I miss having breakfast with an espresso in a nice coffee shop and feeling a different temperature on my face early in the morning while walking to the venue. And, of course, I’ll miss all the new types of stuff that will be presented this year.
Dear attendees, enjoy every minute of your stay in Copenhagen and make it one of your best times in life.
Leonardo Vazquez
ATypI Board Member, Ciudad de México