Alphabettes will end 2016 by celebrating the people who organised inclusive type, typography and design conferences this year. Your commitment and dedication to gender equality means a lot and the success of your events gives us hope that you will be serving as an example for many other conference organisers.

Here’s to you!

In order of percentage of female speakers:

57.89% Sans Everything, FR – Amiens
52.08% ICTVC, GR – Thessaloniki
50.00% Typographics, US – New York City
47.37% AIGA Design Conference, US – Las Vegas
46.67% BTS Away Days, DE – Berlin
42.55% TypeCon, US – Seattle
40.00% Encontro de Tipografia Conference, PT – Lisbon
38.46% Beyond Tellerrand, DE – Düsseldorf
37.50% Rencontres Internationales de Lure, FR – Lurs
37.50% Typofest, BG – Plovdiv
36.27% ATypI, PL – Warsaw
34.78% 7CIT, ES – Valencia
34.29% TYPO, DE – Berlin
33.33% BITS, TH – Bangkok
33.33% DiaTipo, BR – Porto Alegre
30.00% Dynamic Font Day, DE – Munich
25.00% Typo Day Köln, DE – Cologne
23.08% Granshan, EG – Cairo
22.22% DiaTipo, BR – São Paulo
22.22% DiaTipo, BR – Caruaru
20.00% Typo Day Hamburg, DE – Hamburg
15.00% Automatic Type Design, FR – Nancy
14.29% Typo Day Basel, CH – Basel
12.50% Kerning, IT – Faenza
12.50% DiaTipo, BR – Campinas
11.11% Walbaum Wochenende, DE – Weimar
10.00% TYPO Labs, DE – Berlin
5.00% Serebro Nabora, RU – Moscow

 

[This list is not exhaustive but a crop from the conferences we attended. If you know of one that’s missing, feel free to add it in the comments. For the %%%, we counted the persons listed on the speaker pages of the respective conferences. Award badge kindly designed by Ulrike Rausch.]

Almost to the day five years ago Bruno Maag asked me in a job interview about my five year plan. Just out of university with just a few freelance type design assignments on the horizon I told him truthfully that I didn’t have a plan for the following five minutes, let alone months or years.

This seems like a good occasion to catch up with some people who graduated and started their careers in type design at the same time. Elena, Kimya, Marina, Sol and I will talk about our past five years, about our careers, where we come from, where we are now, what we wish someone had told us five years ago and when the things we learned started to fall into place. Continue reading →

From all the books I picked up during my summer travels, one little, plain-looking one fascinated me the most. What is This? is a (~kids) book by Tamara Shopsin playing with our imagination in such a simple, inspiring way, I keep coming back to it almost daily.
Continue reading →

Rounding up the busy summer months with two news posts in a row, here’s what happened in September:

New releases

After being in the works for a while, Laura Meseguer released Multi, a sans-serif family with text and display styles in seven weights for the display and three for text, all with their italics, exclusively available through her, and soon through Type-Ø-Tones’ brand new website. Check out the extensive minisite.

Also long awaited, Nina Stössinger finally released Nordvest, her slab serif with horizontal stress she talked about at Typographics in June. Available at Monokrom.

Portada is the latest typeface by Veronika Burian and TypeTogether, a sturdy serif and “a comprehensive type family for screens” (including a free icon set).

Two Alphabettes released sticker packs for the new iMessages in iOS 10:
Nö by Ulrike Rausch is a set with 50 lovely ways to say “no”. We could all use some of that sometimes. Happy Hauntings by Shauna Lynn Panczyszyn has Halloween-themed illustrations and lettering.
 

Presentations

Ulrike is on a roll, she also gave a talk about OpenType-features at TYPODay in Cologne.

It was a great month for talks as anyone who has been to the ATypI conference in Warsaw knows. There were lots of women speaking, giving workshops, moderating (among others Verena Gerlach, Joyce Ketterer, Aoife Mooney, Ann Bessemans, Indra Kupferschmid, Alice Savoie, Dorine Sauzet, Catherine Dixon, Laura Meseguer, Petra Cerne Oven, Veronika Burian, Sonja Knecht, Bianca Berning, Martina Flor, Briar Levit, Gloria Kondrup, Viktoriya Grabowska, Carima El Behairy, Sofie Beier, Mariko Takagi, Rathna Ramanathan, Aleksandra Samulenkova, Sue Walker) and organising (including Marina Chaccur and Tamye Riggs) and our favourite interviewer Liron Lavi Turkenich conducted video interviews onsite. You can read our ATypI review here.
 

More news from ATypI

Also in Warsaw, the update to the OpenType specification was announced, it now allows for OpenType variable fonts. Bianca Berning was part of the working group that made it happen.

ATypI saw the release of the new 365Typo book, edited by Linda Kudrnovská. There are 78 contributors, 27 of them women, including Bianca Berning, Ann Bessemans, Veronika Burian, Petra Cerne Oven, Marina Chaccur, Catherine Dixon, Shelley Gruendler, Julia Kahl, Sonja Knecht, Indra Kupferschmid, Krista Radoeva, Ksenya Samarskaya, Nina Stössinger and Liron Lavi Turkenich. Many others are mentioned or have their work featured in the book, like Alice Savoie, Erin McLaughlin, Heidi Rand Sørensen, Andrea Tinnes, María Ramos, Jessica Hische and Luisa Baeta. The book also includes articles about Alphabettes and one about our mentorship program.

 
New jobs and awards

Tânia Raposo is the new Type@Cooper West Program Coordinator.

Millie HMK, a script typeface Lila Symons designed for Hallmark Cards, was recognized at AIGA Kansas City’s Twelfth Annual Design Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Typeface Design.

Print Mag’s Best New Typefaces of 2016 (so far) includes Bely, Nordvest, William Text, Kopius, Equitan Sans and Slab.
 

And finally …

Alphabettes.org turned one year old on Sept 10. We celebrated with a design refresh thanks to Nicole Dotin and Amy Papaelias — new fonts, new features (like search, featured posts, and a footer). And we celebrated with cake of course!

With the Northern hemisphere slithering into winter temperatures, let’s recap a bit more of our summer in type:

Fiona Ross interviewed by Eye on Design
British type historian and designer, Fiona Ross was interviewed by Eye on Design about her experience in designing typefaces for for a number of scripts such as Arabic, Hindi, Devanagari, Malayalam, Sinhala, and Thai.

Alphabettes at WMCFest
Jillian Adel and Isabel Urbina Peña both presented at the WMCFest held in Cleveland between August 5–7.

Bianca Berning interviewed by Type Thursday
Type Thursday interviewed Bianca Berning where they discussed her work as head of the Skills and Process department at Dalton Maag, and her involvement with the Alphabettes Mentoring Programme.

Nina Stössinger joins Frere-Jones Type
After closing her studio, Typologic, Nina Stössinger has joined Frere-Jones Type as Senior Designer.

Gender parity at TypeCon Seattle and many of us on stage
At this year’s edition of TypeCon there was gender parity in their line-up of speakers. Speakers and workshop facilitators included Ann Bessemans, Nadine Chahine, Petra Dočekalová, Sibylle Hagmann, Joyce Ketterer, Briar Levit, Aoife Mooney, Mary Catherine Pflug, Nina Stössinger and Laura Worthington.

Roxane Gataud is winner of the 2016 SOTA Catalyst Award
Roxane Gataud was named winner of the 2016 SOTA Catalyst Award. She presented her work at TypeCon, where she was also presented with a certificate designed by Laura Worthington.

protoType exhibition at TypeCon Seattle
The works of Liron Lavi Turkenich and other women designers were selected to be exhibited as part of protoType, a competition and exhibition of the most innovative ideas in type design, held at TypeCon in Seattle.

Kontour joins Type Network
Sibylle Hagman’s Kontour becomes the latest foundry to partner with Type Network.

Isabel Urbina Peña interviewed by Girl Boss
Girl Boss interviewed Isabel Urbina Peña last month where they talked about she got into book design, and her work on Yes, Equal.

And we published our “Greetings from …” vacation series, if you want to let our dream destinations roll past you again.

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Last week, many Alphabettes traveled to Warsaw for the 60th annual ATypI conference. ICYMI and aren’t suffering from enough type conference fomo, you can live vicariously through their personal impressions, takeaways and favorite talks. Photos by Alessia Mazzarella. Continue reading →

A few days ago, I had the honor to be awarded by SOTA (Society of Typography Aficionados). On the 26th of August, I stood on stage during TypeCon to receive the 2016 Catalyst award and then present my work.

I wanted to write a bit about the certificate I received, because first, it was designed by another Alphabette: Laura Worthington, and second, it’s just gorgeous.

Look at this:

Isn’t it just great ?

Laura did this ALL BY HAND, I am so impressed.

Just a quick line about it: Laura explained to me how she stalked me on social media to find some aspects of my personality. She chose to draw fruits to recall my collection of fruit stickers, patterns for my collection of vintage parisian floor tiles (#passionvieuxcarreaux on my instagram), and of course a dinosaur.

Colors + gold (she used shell gold to paint it. It’s 24 karat gold mixed with a binding agent ✨), and this amazing type, all done by hand. What she didn’t know about me is that I absolutely love when typefaces have their top « regular » and bottom part ornamented as you can see in the « SOTA » word. As I don’t know the proper word for this style, I call them « typefaces with fancy socks ». So I am delighted to have also a sample of this style on my certificate.

Thank you so much Laura, I absolutely love it.

I recently attended the American Typecasting Fellowship conference in the finger lakes region in upstate New York. If you think this is something that mainly attracts men over 70 you are completely right. Nevertheless, the number of women in attendance who are active in type casting more than doubled this year (~3) compared to 2014.

I’m very glad I got to know the awesome Jessie Reich for instance. She recently graduated from Wells College’s great book arts program and now works at the Bixler Letterfoundry in Skaneateles, NY, once a week running the Monotype Super Caster as well as her own letterpress and design practice Punky Press Studio.

Continue reading →