Join us in Montreal for ATypI!

Type Network is proud to support Atypique, this year’s ATypI conference in Montreal, as a Titanium sponsor. Not only do we have quite a few colleagues and friends on stage, but Type Network’s Tamye Riggs deserves special plaudits as ATypI’s Executive Director and conference organizer. We’re also happy to sponsor both the closing keynote by Type Network cofounder Roger Black and event moderation by Type Network writer Yves Peters. Here’s what you can expect from our crew this week.

Head honcho: on Saturday, September 16, Type Network cofounder and TYPE magazine publisher Roger Black will close off the 61st annual ATypI conference at 5:30 p.m. with his keynote “The Type Boom.” Don’t miss it!

But up first, on Tuesday, September 12, John Downer, friend of Type Network and designer of several Font Bureau faces, will conduct the sign-painting workshop “Single Stroke Block Letters.” Learn how to efficiently draw sans serif caps with a paintbrush in this daylong class.

On Wednesday, September 13, foundry partner and Type Network designer and font technician David Jonathan Ross will get on stage at noon. Starting from his personal experience, and with the help of several resources, Ross will explain “How *not* to draw accents.” Ross will also join Indra Kupferschmid, Bianca Berning, and Elizabeth Carey Smith in the panel discussion What am I? on Friday, September 15 at 4 p.m.

On Thursday, September 14, Type Network performs a hat trick, with three of four talks before the first coffee break. At 9:40 a.m., Yves Peters kicks off the morning program with a “Progress report from the Adobe Typography Customer Advisory Board.” Peters will give an overview of improvements to the typographic user interfaces in Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications since 2015, and offer some thoughts on what he would like to see happen next.

At 10:20 a.m., design director, UX designer, and type designer for Font Bureau and Type Network (among others) Santiago Orozco will explore “User Interfaces in Type Design, Opportunities in Variable Fonts.” Beyond the issues with OpenType features, the new OpenType 1.8 spec adds a new layer of complexity to designing, manipulating, and consuming fonts.

And at 10:40 a.m., foundry partner and Type Network cofounder Petr van Blokland will reveal how you can “Code All Your Graphic Designs with PageBot, DrawBot and Variation Fonts.” Van Blokland will prove that you can eliminate countless repetitive tasks with programmatic design, and show how you can quickly and effortlessly adapt your designs to different formats and mediums.

On Friday, September 15, web designer, type designer, and full-stack developer Quinn Keaveney—who developed the Richard Lipton and Gasket online brochures for Type Network and the MCKL minisite for Webtype— will take the stage at 5 p.m. In “Thinking of building a new foundry site?” Keaveney will analyze two very different type foundries to show how he built ecommerce platforms for them.

Also on Friday, September 15, foundry partner Underware’s Bas Jacobs and Akiem Helmling will present “Designing Duos–A Two Sided Story,” at 5:40 p.m. They will show a revolutionary monoline script that has been in development for several years—a design that pushes the boundaries of the OpenType font format to its extremes.

Type Network editorial chief Tamye Riggs is ATypI’s Executive Director. She organized this year’s conference with the local crew in Montreal (including our own Alexandre Saumier Demers), and will be a steady—and steadying—presence throughout the event.

Friends of the house Stephen Coles, Amy Papaelias, and Elizabeth Carey Smith will also be on the scene and in the spotlight at ATypI this year. Type Networker Caren Litherland, who served on the program review committee along with Demers, Peters, Smith, and foundry partner Sibylle Hagmann, will cover the conference. For a complete overview of this week’s talks and other activities, consult the conference program on the ATypI site. And if you can’t be in Montreal, you can always follow along on Twitter!