Since it’s World Emoji Day and we here at Alphabettes 💚 emoji, I want to share a few things I learned at Emojicon, a day long celebration of all things emoji, in Brooklyn, New York on Saturday, July 14. Emojicon is organized by the fine folks at Emojination, a grassroots effort to help democratize the arcane and cryptic emoji approval process. You can also thank them for the dumpling, the hijab, and the broccoli, among other emoji success stories.
No worries. Here’s the recording: http://mixlr.com/alphabettes/showreel/alphabettes-variety-show-at-typographics-2018/
If you need some visuals for your audio listening experience, check out the live tweet-storm (thanks, Indra!) or the ultimate in public embarrassment, this Instagram story (thanks, Tânia!).
These are eight of the many highlights and corresponding notes made by me—a typographer, mostly for print—upon reading Laura Kalbag’s book Accessibility for Everyone released last fall by A Book Apart.
1. “…everyone uses the web quite differently.”
Perhaps obvious. But we all know about what happens when we assume and assumptions are at the root of problems related to accessibility.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Last year, we celebrated by going on strike. This year, we’re introducing you to some experts on type, calligraphy, and lettering live from Robothon 2018 on Instagram. Follow along!
Top: Alessia Mazzarella, Noe Blanco, Nicolien van der Keur.
Middle: Linda Hintz, Irina Smirnova, Christine Gertsch.
Bottom: Sophie Caron, Monika Bartels, Françoise “Fransje” Berserik.
When I first heard about Alphabettes, the name immediately had my attention. As an appreciator of all things punny, I was intrigued. I soon found out it was a place where both women and their opinions were encouraged, and they gathered to talk type. They had lived up to their pun.
While I was savouring this wonderful name and going through the website, I couldn’t help notice the potential for another wordplay. The Hindi word for Daughter is बेटी (beti). It sounds a lot like “bette”. I relished the idea of Alpha bette doubling as “Alpha daughter” in Greek/Hindi. To make it sound more like the plural “Bettes” I pluralised the Hindi word बेटी (beti) using English rules to make it बेटीस (betis). If you’ve spent extended periods of time with me, you might be aware that punning is a serious sport for me and I sometimes tend to go overboard which is why I sat on this pun for about two years. It took me a while and a bit of encouragement to go public with this idea. When I finally wrote to the Alphabettes they green-lit this multilingual pun idea for their header swiftly much to my delight and relief.
Living in Australia is awesome but one of the toughest moments during the year is when the “type conference season” starts. If you — like me — suffer of major FOMO and don’t even want to open Twitter for weeks, maybe now is a good time to schedule a trip overseas and make it coincide with your favourite Type Conference! Some of them are listed below:
ISType Mono – Istanbul, TR
February 22, 2018
Typo Day – Mumbai, IN
March 1–3, 2018
Robothon – The Hague, NL
March 8–9, 2018
Type Drives Culture – New York City, US
March 23, 2018
Continue reading
Yesterday was a good day for type releases designed or co-designed by women, so here’s a quick double showcase to commemorate the event.
Project: Corsair
Designer: Ksenya Samarskaya
Foundry: Rosetta Type
Team Members: Azamat Kodzoev, Micha Strukov, James Todd (Drawing); Mathieu Réguer (Post-production)
Published: 2018
Link: Corsair
Project: Conductor
Designers: Tobias Frere-Jones and Nina Stössinger
Foundry: Frere-Jones Type
Team Members: Fred Shallcrass
Published: 2018
Link: Conductor
Continue reading
We salute those type conference organisers who decided to use their 2017 chapter as an opportunity to improve their speakers lists towards gender equality and we can’t wait to see this dedication inspire the ones that are still failing to keep pace.
In order of percentage of female speakers:
59% Ultrafett, DE – Bielefeld (c)
56% Typism, AU – Gold Coast (c)
54% (+4%) Typographics, US – New York City (c)
50% (+10%) Encontro de Tipografia Conference, PT – Faro (c+p)
49% (+6%) TypeCon, US – Boston (c+p)
46% (+8%) Rencontres Internationales de Lure, FR – Lurs (c)
44% FEED (Foro de Edición e Deseño), ES – Santiago de Compostela (c)
43% ESAD, Everyday Reading, FR – Amiens (c)
34% (–2%) ATypI, CA – Montréal (c+p)
33% Dia Tipo, BR – Curitiba (c)
33% FURE – Future of Reading, DE – Muenster (c)
32% ISType, TR – Istanbul (c)
31% (–2%) BITS, TH – Bangkok (c)
31% Tipografilia, MX – Ciudad de México (c)
29% (–6%) TYPO Berlin, DE – Berlin (c+p)
29% (+5%) Granshan, AM – Yereven (p)
26% Typo Day, IN – Sri Lanka (p)
25% Face/Interface, US – Stanford (c+p)
25% Typotage, DE – Leipzig (c)
24% AGI Open, FR – Paris (c)
22% Dia Tipo, BR – Rio de Janeiro (c)
22% Letrástica, MX – Guadalajara (c)
21% Dia Tipo, BR – Brasilia (c)
17% Typo Day, DE – Hamburg (c)
17% (+7%) TYPO Labs, DE – Berlin (c+p)
13% (0%) Kerning, IT – Faenza (c)
8% Typetersburg, RU – St. Petersburg (c)
Certainly you’ve already gotten twenty dozen emails alerting you that today is CYBER MONDAY and that you MUST SHOP or you’re not doing your duty as a citizen of Planet Earth. If that consumer hypnosis has gotten to you, but you’re wondering how to support some awesome independent women in typography whilst stuffing those stockings this year, check out the shops below!
Left image courtesy Nicole Phillips / right image courtesy Maria Montes
From prints to shirts, greeting cards to enamel pins, these ladies have you covered this holiday season. Please feel free to let us know in the comments what other online stores we may be missing!
On the way to a depressing union meeting on contract negotiations, I had about 20 minutes to spare so I headed to the library stacks and found a book on women in the printing trades. Here are a few quotes that jumped out:
“[W]e have never obtained a situation that we could not have obtained had we never heard of a union. We refuse to take the men’s situations when they are on strike, and when there is no strike if we ask for work in union offices we are told by union foremen ‘that there are no conveniences for us.’ We are ostracized in many offices because we are members of the union; and although the principle is right, disadvantages are so many that we cannot much longer hold together.”
“She was dressed plainly but neatly in what might be called a cross between a traveling and office suit of brown color. The toughened expression on her face indicated that she was familiar with the tricks of the profession, versed in the study of vulgarity. No tender, trusting female was she, but a hardened, suspicious, masculine woman.”
“This paper is a veritable man-hater; not the slightest mention of a man in any shape or form is to be found in its columns, neither is the genus homo allowed to hawk it!”
“At least let women have a fair opportunity to do something else besides get married. What man is there who would not resent being told that his chief ambition in life should be to be a father? Yet women are told daily that they should devote twenty years of a lifetime in the preparing for motherhood, at least ten years in bearing children, and the rest of their lives in recovering from the effects. If they prefer to think that the world is populated sufficiently, or that to bear a child does not call for the sacrifice of a lifetime, they are snubbed, and especially so when they show any inclination to compete with men in trades.”
Guess what year they’re from? Comments are open!
🚨🚨🚨SPOILER ALERT🚨🚨🚨
The answers are available below. You can also head to the comments first if you’re curious what others guessed.