Ferdinand Ulrich Sixty years ago the type industry began to radically change towards digital technologies. While this change did not occur over night, it is best described as a long transitional period that spans almost two decades of explorations into different models of numerical letterform description. In response to these developments, various environments emerged as nurturing grounds of discourse and as a catalyst of change. The Working Seminars, a new conference format established by the ATypI in the early 1970s in partnership with different academic institutions, serves as a prime example of such environments.
The 1983 ATypI Working Seminar at Stanford University marks a highpoint in this discourse. The list of speakers reveals an impeccable medley of punch cutters, computer scientists, stone cutters as well as leading and emerging type designers who came together at Stanford to discuss “the computer and the hand in type design”. At the heart of discussion, five so-called digital type design systems encapsulate the pressing issues and challenges that a new community faced at the time. Over forty years later, this keynote explores those challenges and revisits the exciting Stanford presentations many of which have been overlooked since 1983, but remain very relevant today.