The 365typo yearbook represents a new level of self-awareness in the typographic community.
365typo is a yearbook featuring the key issues, themes, and events in typography, type design, graphic design, and visual communication, covered by the best writers in the field. The concept is the brainchild of the team behind the renowned Czech Typo magazine, French publisher étapes, and ATypI. It is, in the view of the Association’s Board of Directors, a service to the industry, a source for future research, and an important tool in achieving one of ATypI’s most important tasks: the promotion and preservation of the culture, tradition, and history of type and typography.
This annual book helps professionals, educators, and students find their way through the labyrinth of current developments and trends. Based on information collected from ATypI’s network of country delegates and other experts, 365typo produces a global snapshot of the state of the type industry, providing the necessary understanding of the asymmetries of the typography field across cultures, languages, and writing systems.
365typo helps ATypI to reach out to people working in fields neighboring typography, who may not be aware of the activities organized – and endorsed – by the Association, its affiliates, and its members. The book also contributes to keeping records of the Association’s own activities, hence becoming an important source for future research: an archive that documents the era, serving as a time capsule appreciated by readers not only today, but as a source they can return to over the years, when online data (websites, type foundries, blogs, etc.) might not be longer available.
TypeCapsule
By John Berry
(Originally published in 365typo, No 1)
365typo represents a new level of self-awareness in the typographic community. And it is entirely appropriate that ATypI be the organizer of this new endeavor.
Typography is a worldwide practice, and the design of the typefaces that typographers use stretches across a wide range of languages, cultures, and writing systems. Through its annual conferences, held in a different country each year, ATypI tracks the rich development of new typographic tools and the creative uses to which they’ve been put. Especially in recent years, ATypI has reached beyond the old typographic heartland of Western European languages and encouraged interaction among the many typographic communities of today’s world. 365typo is a way to extend this effort, and to serve as a repository and a summary of what’s happening in type design, typography, and graphic design today.
Each volume is a time capsule of the state of the art (and the craft, and the ever-evolving technology). No single publication has done this in a long time; indeed, perhaps no publication has ever done it on quite such a global scale. Once upon a time, when publishing was done entirely on paper, the Penrose Annual, based in Britain, took stock of the latest advances in the printing trade, including the design and manufacture of type. In its heyday, Penrose kept track of what was new and what seemed worth remembering. But that annual ceased publication in the early 1980s. The venerable Arts et métiers graphiques performed a similar role in France; but again, it’s long gone. Other efforts have usually been more narrowly focused.
365typo is conceived as a printed book that is fully integrated with digital publishing, as befits any such publication in today’s multi-faceted world. It does not compete with other publications; it extends them, and in some cases introduces them to each other. In the pages of 365typo, you will find the voices of type, typography, and graphic design around the world, recorded in a lasting form that will both inspire us today and preserve a record for the future.