You read that right! ATypI is broadening its horizons once more. Our board of directors confirmed that we’re going to two amazing locations for our conferences next year. We’re headed to that incredible “West Coast Ivy,” Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California, United States, for our next conference in Spring 2026.
Spring is a serious stunner in the Silicon Valley area of Northern California, with eye-popping sapphire blue skies, balmy breezes, palm trees, and cherry blossoms dancing around for much of the spring. We’re looking forward to glorious weather on top of glorious typography a year or so from now, when our community will be converging upon Palo Alto from up and down the West Coast, from the San Francisco Bay Area to Monterrey and points further south, north, east, and west. it’s a place where high tech meets high art, where some of the best sushi in the world is found next to the best street tacos in the galaxy.
But we couldn’t leave it at that. We received an exceptionally strong host proposal from the Middle East, for a different but equally extraordinary time of year. We’re excited to present our second major conference next year at that Emirati jewel, the University of Sharjah, in its namesake city near Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. This ATypI conference will be presented in Fall 2026, a time ripe with festivals, entertainment, and weather designed for night trips to the desert and lazy-day bonding on the beach. Not to mention the amazing palm trees in this amazing cultural capital of the UAE. Oh, and the type… the calligraphy… the hand lettering… the art… the tech. The everything! It will be our first conference in the Middle East, and we couldn’t be more excited.
Although we’ve had multiple smaller events in a single year, or one big gathering plus a working seminar sharing a year, we think this is the first time in ATypI’s storied history that we’re producing two major conferences at vastly different points on the globe in the same calendar year.
We’re happy to pilot this new concept for our conferences. We have been paying attention to the changing needs of our community and what they want from us in terms of typographic experiences. We will be finetuning our conferences so that the total event length and number of speakers, exhibitions, workshops, sponsors, partners, and attendees are manageable and comfortable for all involved while remaining diverse and uniquely ATypI. We will strive to ensure that regional influences and culture remain strong at every turn while bringing the distinctive spirit of the international typographic community wherever we go.
A core part of the ATypI mission is to promote type design, typography, and the related arts and sciences worldwide, and to give a platform and voice to those remarkable people working, teaching, and studying in our fields of interest. By presenting two large events annually, plus smaller events in years where feasible, we can reach many more people who love types across scripts, languages, cultures, and places. We will cross borders and boundaries while being true to our love of type deeply and design, tech, art, and culture broadly.
We look forward to working with two brilliant and cool local teams at Stanford and the University of Sharjah and being part of these unique communities before, during, and after our 2026 conferences. You’ll learn much more about these local teams soon, but for now, we’re hitting the “Publish” button.