The conference was held at the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dates were 10 October to 14 October 2012.
If you have more information and resources about the conference — photos, videos, reviews, slides, memories and more — please get in touch with us. We’d love to improve this page with as many resources as possible.
The theme of this year’s conference is ‘墨 [mò] – between black and white’. Mò – meaning ink – is at the heart of Chinese calligraphy and painting as well as a metaphor for intellectual pursuits. ‘Know the white and guard the black’ (知白守黑) is an expression from philosopher Lao Tzu that speaks of a virtuous life as well as an aesthetic sensibility. A Chinese calligrapher aims to achieve equilibrium of black and white not in an absolute sense, but an organic and intuitive balance. The importance of the balancing of black and white is a shared value between both Eastern and Western typographic cultures. When we put something in black and white, we speak of the essence of the written word as a means to exchange and preserve information and knowledge for all, playing an important role in our culture and society. ‘Between black and white’ not only celebrates this shared tradition but also acknowledges that black and white form a complementary relationship with each other, hence a wide spectrum of viewpoints are possible between the two.
Website
- ATypI Hong Kong 2012 (Wayback Machine)
Photos
- ATypI Hong Kong 2012 Group pool (Flickr)
- John D. Berry: ATypI Hong Kong 2012 (Flickr)
- Typography at Reading: Non-Latin scripts exhibition in Hong Kong
Exhibition
- From hot-metal to OpenType – the type design process for world scripts (Wayback Machine). The 3-week long exhibition was launched by a keynote presentation by Paul Luna, who discussed the research possibilities of the Reading collection and laid stress on the need for the more immaterial evidence of contemporary font production to be preserved in the same way as physical evidence from the past, the survival of which helps us understand the processes involved and provides an evidence base for current font design. With an audience drawn from China and the East Asia region, India, Europe and the Americas, this was global exposure for one of Reading’s key research collections, with appreciation being expressed both at the conference and subsequently on social media. Exhibition co-curators Ross and Vaibhav Singh selected documents and artefacts to tell the story of type production across technologies in Amharic, Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai. A supporting display of newspapers in these scripts showed many of the fonts in use. An accompanying book, Non-Latin scripts: from metal to digital type, with contributions by Fiona Ross, Graham Shaw, John D. Berry and Paul Luna, was also published. [Buy the book]
Reviews
- ESPI on site: Same same, but different at ATypI Hong Kong
by Sonja Knecht. - ATypI 2012 in Hong Kong
by Luc Devroye. - Metropolis Magazine: Preserving The Past & Future of Chinese Letterpress
Dungjai reports on one of the most popular workshops, the Chinese-English Bilingual Letterpress Demo that took place at Zi Wut, Kowloon.
Branding
Conference branding was by Moussa Sakouk: