It was a small, intimate gathering of type designers and others who care about type. TypeCon 98 was held over Halloween weekend in the unlikely venue of a small Marriott hotel in a high-tech business park in Westborough, Massachusetts, a stone’s throw from Boston-girdling Interstate 495. TypeCon was the brainchild of Bob Colby, as was the sponsoring body, the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA). As a fledgling event, TypeCon 98 achieved the critical intellectual mass needed for good conversation and interaction, but it didn’t achieve the critical financial mass needed in order to pay for itself. Despite this, the response from participants was so overwhelmingly favorable that many plans were hatched to make sure the TypeCon has the resources to grow and evolve.
The emphasis on type design was a function of who got involved earliest in the process. According to Colby, type designers were simply the first group that responded, and he firmly wants to reach out to all users, creators, and just plain fans of type. At TypeCon 98, anyone who uses type could have gotten an intensive crash course in the state of type design and the type business, at a fraction of the cost of most general design conferences.
TypeCon featured Matthew Carter as its “principal speaker, ” and a number of less venerable typographic experts and designers filled an evolving track of panels and single-person presentations that sparked lively debate and constant interaction. There was virtually no division between presenters and audience. (The contrast to last spring’s FUSE98 in San Francisco sprang immediately to several minds.)
Chris MacGregor, of Union Type and the Internet Type Foundry Index, provided a couple of very cogent talks, one on marketing your fonts online, the other on “cutting-edge design” as a child of the desktop-publishing revolution. Chris had promised to post online reports on TypeCon throughout the weekend, but he only managed partial coverage — because, he said, he was too wrapped up in what was going on and didn’t want to pull himself away.
Hrant Papazian showed up several times on the program, lending a strong multilingual and multi-alphabetical slant to the discussions. (Since he grew up using three alphabets, he’s much more aware than most American designers of the typographical world beyond our twenty-six letters.) He spearheaded a discussion of alphabet reform, presenting his own idea for revisionist letterforms and then leading a panel on alphabet reform in general. (Chris MacGregor found an account from the 1962 Penrose Annual of a town in Britain where the children had been raised reading a reformed, one-sound-to-each-letter alphabet. What amazed him was that any town would agree to have their youngest generation turned into a test group. “In this country, you’d have people complaining that alphabet reform was against God.” The results, however, were apparently benign.) Hrant also invited audience participation in creating an abstract font that would test the limits of letterform recognition.
Allan Haley organized a series of panels on aspects of “the business of type.” The first one, on “Making Industrial-Strength Fonts,” brought out quite a lot of specific and useful advice. Brian Sooy, of Sooy Type Foundry, described the care needed to create type families using Adobe’s multiple-master technology, and lamented that, in his eyes, “Fontographer’s hinting defaults are all wrong.” Michael Want of P-22 stressed basics such as getting all the PostScript points and handles properly aligned, while Michael Leary of Galápagos Design Group emphasized what’s necessary to make a font work across a variety of platforms and character sets. The subject of hinting got a workout, especially its two almost contradictory goals: representing the identifying features of a print typeface on screen, and making a screen font usable in its own right. In response to a question, Leary confirmed that TrueType hinting can be “nonlinear,” to achieve the best spacing at various screen sizes.
The second “Business of Type” panel, “Guerrilla Marketing,” drew a lot of interest from an audience so heavily salted with type designers. The approaches ranged from Linotype’s fairly traditional methods, described by Steve Byers, which include the thick typeface catalog already handed out to TypeCon attendees, to Chank Diesel’s tales of roaming the country talking to art directors at independent record labels and handing them his catalog — an 11x17 specimen sheet that he would run off as needed at Kinko’s. (Chank showed up at the panel in stylish pajamas. “When you sell fonts like this, you have to live a certain lifestyle,” he said.) Brian Willson, who runs Three Islands Press in Maine, said he went from distributing his handwriting-based fonts as shareware, first on America Online and then on the web, to selling them commercially, after he’d found his fonts pirated and sold on a commercial CD. And Miles Newlyn, whose fonts are distributed by Emigre, claimed that he had no involvement in marketing, but he went on to extol the importance of descriptive text in the presentation of new type designs.
Chank followed up on Newlyn’s remarks by describing his “font of the month” program and the T-shirts, Zippo lighters, and other paraphernalia that he creates and sells. “People like brands,” he said. (Though this does suggest the idea of a font as something that you use once and then throw away.) Allan Haley expanded this to say that the audience for typefaces is graphic designers, “and graphic designers love stuff.” Everyone seemed to agree that buyers of type develop strong customer loyalty if they’re treated right.
When Haley asked each panelist who his core audience was, the most surprising answers were from Brian Willson (“historical re-enacters”) and Chank Diesel (“teenage boys”).
In the third “Business of Type” panel, on Sunday, “Picking the Right Design Goals,” there was much discussion of type revivals and whether they were a good thing. Someone asked Matthew Carter, who has worked from many historical models while not truly “reviving” an earlier design: “When is there too much, or too little, of your personality in the typeface?” That, said Carter, is the question of type design. He cited the example of Fred Goudy, the most distinctive of American type designers, whose personality was visible in every one of his typefaces — but who, in his later years, “began to do revivals of himself.”
Matthew Carter’s keynote talk, on Saturday night, was a highlight of TypeCon, and in its informality and back-and-forthness it epitomized the character of this unhierarchical gathering. Although he showed slides and talked about typefaces he had designed, it was far from the sort of “portfolio review” that characterizes too many big design conferences. People asked questions and Carter answered them, sometimes asking his own questions in turn. And even the subject of his talk was subversive of established hierarchies, since he was pointing out that the history of lettering is not a stately progression from style to style, and that in fact there has been “alternative” letter design from the very beginning.
After the speech, a number of the attendees went off down the road to a Halloween party at a local karaoke bar, where ringleader Chris MacGregor had promised that they would show up “costumed as type aficionados. ” Highlights of the late evening appear to have included Miles Newlyn’s handwriting analysis, but as for the karaoke, according to MacGregor, “none of us were bad enough to be up on stage. ”
Like the best of such gatherings, TypeCon turned into both a business and a social event, and the distinction was sometimes blurred. (Was the opening-night party in the hotel, organized by Chank Diesel and El Mack de los Toros, more of a “business” event than trading type tips in the karaoke bar?) TypeCon 98 packed a lot of material into a weekend, and it worked well for the small group of people who were there. (Attendance was usually less than 100.) The organizers are clearly on to something, and next time it ought to draw a much larger audience. The trick will be keep the high level of participation and interaction. But that seems like a challenge well worth meeting.