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.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

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 →

This week, Alphabettes.org turned one. Blogs, they grow up so fast! We’re celebrating with cake.

We wanted a place on the internet to publish our own thoughts and writing, so we did what any self-respecting, overcommitted people do: we started a new side project. Within two weeks of registering the domain name, the site was live. Scrappy and minimal, the original design worked (through many late night, trans-Atlantic sessions of reckless-intermediate theme editing), but we quickly began feeling some growing pains. One year later, the site boasts around 145 posts (and 25 headers), most of which feature previously unpublished content.

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 →

The Alphabettes are taking a small break from their travels to bring you news from July. We hope to back with monthly updates from this month; wish us luck!

Tribute to Rosemary Sassoon during the 7º Congreso Internacional de Tipografía
At 7º Congreso Internacional de Tipografía held in Valencia (Spain), tribute was paid to Rosemary Sassoon, who is best known for designing the Sassoon series of typefaces specifically for children.

Alphabettes at 6th International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication (ICTVC)
At the 6th International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication (ICTVC), which was held in Thessaloniki (Greece), Liron Lavi Turkenich presented a talk on the subject Latinised Hebrew, Radical anecdotes in search for solutions, and also joined Laura Meseguer, Luisa Baeta, Bianca Berning, Alessia Mazzarella for a panel discussion on Collaborative practices in typeface design.

Continue reading →

July! That means half of 2016 is already over! Gotta catch up with the news (we’ll thank us in a couple of years). So what happened since the last round-up …

February: We published our Love Letter Series

Feb 2: Diana Ovezea released her type series Equitan Sans and Slab with ITF

Feb 16: The exhibition “A+: 100 years of graphic communication by women at Central Saint Martins” opened in London, organized by Ruth Sykes

Continue reading →