Arriving on stage bearing gifts and giant hand-drawn posters, Eike König began with a mesmerizing and rapid-paced video featuring beautiful graphic design – drawings, album covers, editorials, covers – everything you need to be hypnotized into a better design state of mind.
Stephen begins with the development of his interest in type, “How did I get here?” with the definition of synesthesia: the involuntary tying together of two senses. He then shows a series of type samples and into the microphone produces a series of unusual but fitting sounds. “When I see this, my mind hears this.”
Sean McBride is an engineer and product developer at Typekit, which is to say, he does a little bit of everything. In, “More Than Type,” he reveals how Typekit does a little bit of everything too. In developing a service to license and display fonts on sites for a subscription, Typekit introduced a radical idea: in addition to their fundamental service, Typekit educates its customers about how to get the most out of that service.
Satsuki Shibuya shared an inspiring talk about her experiences, insights and thoughts on how a sudden illness completely changed her way of approaching business and life.
Interfaces allow us to interact with systems that use other languages that are not our own. The process is always a little awkward. Travis illustrates this with the example of a conversation between two people who don’t share a native language, but do both speak english. They get by, but only in a strained manner.
He took the audience on a whistle-stop tour of the history of FontFont, an independent Berlin-based font foundry that has been at the the forefront of innovations in type for the past two decades.
Walking us through her widely diverse array of works, Keetra Dean Dixon delighted and inspired her TYPO audience today. Initially showing some of her past work, her inquisitive nature immediately became evident through her thoughtful, experimental, and sincerely absurd projects, such as The Anonymous Hugging Wall and her Union Sleeve. Keetra then broke up the rest of her presentation into parts titled Thinking Through Making and Making Through Breaking.
Kali Nikitas introduced her friend, Ludovic Balland, to the stage, and opened Typo Day 2 with the questions, “Who likes type? Who likes sex? Who likes sexy type?” At the end of Ludovic’s talk, Kali commented that in the beginning, the audience might’ve been wondering, who are you, but by the end, we just want to hold you! And that was exactly how I felt.
Christoph Niemann started out his talk on a lovely visual play on how we input our passwords. It was a delightful illustration in a type of wit that only Christoph Niemann seems to possess. So how does he do it? For his talk he began by diving into his process and the life of an illustrator. According to him, it turns out the majority of the day is spent in agony with pockets of joy in getting the initial idea and invoicing.
Faythe Levine’s latest book and documentary film, both titled Sign Painters, explore the trade of hand-painted signage in America today. Since information on sign painting was scarce, Faythe presented her research for her documentary that ranged from hard-to-find books and magazine on the subject to letters from family members of sign painters that were excited about the upcoming documentary.
“We live in an era where we tend to appreciate experts because experts are trained to deliver the results over and over in the same way…this however doesn’t really apply so well to creative professions. So how do we become experts in creative fields?”
A Typo first, Monique Jenkinson and Mica Sigourney presented an insightful and illuminating exploration of performance art and explored the role of drag and community in San Francisco.
