TypeCon 2006

TypeCon has come to an end. The week was extremely interesting, especially for a first-timer like myself.

I won’t go on forever detailing every session and social event, but suffice to say that I am very glad to be a part of such a great group of people that make up the type community. To be totally honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect when interacting with people from other companies who might be considered “the competition”, but I quickly learned that most everyone on the scene seems to be more of a family than anything. Everyone is related somehow, and the majority of people seem to focus more on a love for typography than anything else (either that or I’m just happily naïve).

I’m sure there were all kinds of business talks going on behind the scenes but, as a designer, I was glad to find most of the events and conversations focusing on the art of type more than anything else (ie, the fun stuff!).

The materials I designed for MyFonts seemed to go over well. For those of you who attended and took some of the buttons, but weren’t sure if you got the full set, I’m including an image of all 13 designs here:

I also set up an album on MyFonts of all the fonts I used for the buttons.

Similarly, I’ll include a photo of our tablecloth. We had a contest going to see if anyone could identify every font in the alphabet, but as of now we have still not met anyone who can ID all 26 (so far, Stephen Coles from FontShop and Typographica has come the closest). Feel free to give it a shot yourself… a helpful hint is that each font name begins with that letter of the alphabet (eg, “C” is for “Clarendon”).

I’ll end by saying that the final event at the Museum of Printing was the perfect way to close the week. Hearing Larry Oppenberg and Mike Parker talk about Chauncey Griffith and his contributions to the Mergenthaler Linotype library, and then flipping through all the actual drawings (some older than 80 years!) in person was quite an experience.

Hearing old anecdotes from Howard Hansen was priceless, and it will certainly be hard to top the reaction from John Collins (my boss) when he unexpectedly ran into an archaic (and bright pink!) “MVP” peripheral that he built decades ago to run the Mergenthaler “VIP” photo-typesetter.

In case you haven’t done so already, I will direct you to become a member of the museum so that more people will be able to experience stuff like this in the future.

Looking forward to next year’s TypeCon in Seattle!