This panel discussion will address methodologies of spacing and kerning, asking the question whether we could do better if we shed the inheritance of movable type.
In a digital world, where anything goes, are the concepts of “sidebearings” and “kerning” really the best we’ve got? How can we learn from non-Latin type? Can spacing workflows be improved? Can font formats be better at storing spacing info?
Just van Rossum
Type Designer / Programmer
Just van Rossum graduated in 1989 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, where he studied with Gerrit Noordzij. His collaborations with Erik van Blokland under the name LettError became well known and their FF Beowolf typeface has been included in the permanent collection of the MoMa in New…
Bianca Berning
Font Engineer, Dalton Maag (London)
Bianca Berning is a font engineer with background in civil engineering, communication and typeface design. After completing her MA in typeface design in Reading in 2011 she joined Dalton Maag, a London-based type foundry. She now heads the Skills & Process department, a multidisciplinary team of typeface designers, font engineers…
John Hudson
Type Designer & Co-founder of Tiro Typeworks Ltd. (Gabriola BC)
John Hudson designs typefaces and makes fonts. As co-founder of Tiro Typeworks Ltd., a digital foundry specialising in custom font solutions for multilingual publishing and computing, he has been responsible for or has collaborated on type designs for Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Latin, Odia, Sinhala, Telugu,…
Toshi Omagari
Advanced Typeface Designer, Monotype
Toshi Omagari is an Advanced Typeface Designer at Monotype, based in London, UK. He studied typography and typeface design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo where he graduated in 2008, and went on to join MA in typeface design at University of Reading in 2011. Since he joined Monotype, he has released…
Victor Gaultney
Senior Type Designer, SIL International
Victor Gaultney is a type designer and calligrapher with interests in legibility, diacritics, non-Latin scripts and italics. As Senior Type Designer at SIL International, he develops fonts for minority language groups around the world. He teaches typeface design at the University of Reading, is a co-author of the SIL Open…
Rob McKaughan
Typographer in the Advanced Reading Technologies, Microsoft
Rob McKaughan has a great many interests (or a very short attention span): He has worked in software development and interaction design at Microsoft and at Amazon Web Services, studied typeface design at the University of Reading, made a documentary film about endurance bicycling, and along the way has consumed…
Sahar Afshar
Type designer, Researcher (Iran)
Sahar Afshar is a type designer and researcher from Iran. Her interest in typography during her years as a student at the University of Tehran led her to the University of Reading, from which she holds an MA by Research in Typography & Graphic Communication. Since graduation, she has been…