Ferdinand Ulrich Capacity: 20 people
Tour ticket is required
The Special Collections at Stanford’s University Archives hold unique primary source materials related to the earliest period of digital type and digital typography.
This year’s ATypI conference offers an opportunity to engage in such materials from the collections of Donald Knuth (e.g. on development of Metafont, an early digital type design systems) and other key figures of Stanford’s Digital Typography program that was formed in 1982.
In a guided session we will take a closer look at selected papers, correspondence and photographs as well as more unconventional archival materials such as sticky notes, sketches or “digital smoke proofs” in order to understand why letterforms look a certain way, who made those decisions and how they may have informed a curriculum in digital type design.
The guided session targets anyone interested in methodologies for discovering and investigating primary source materials from a transitional period when letters are best described as dematerialized.