Down with Web Typography
Down with ‘web typography’, long live ‘typography on the web’. Indra will open Ampersand by persuading us to retire the notion of web typography as a special case with its own rules, and instead have us consider the typographic pitfalls specific to type on screens.
Professor Indra Kupferschmid is a German typographer and Professor at HBKsaar, University of Arts Saarbrücken. Fuelled by specimen books, she is occupied with type around the clock in all its incarnations – webfonts, other fonts, type history, DIN committees, writing, and design work. She consults for the type and design industry, and other any clients who need help choosing fonts or assessing typography.
To Hell for Type
Medium aims to bring world-class typography to readers and writers. However, what appears to be clean on the surface often meant creative, but awkward solutions underneath. Marcin will share some battle scars, talk heinous hacks he’ll go to hell for, and divulge stories including the curse of the medium Medium font, the 150-year typographical war with Chrome, and the origin story of Fontificator, the “Bloomberg terminal for fonts.”
Marcin Wichary is a designer and developer working at Medium in San Francisco. Prior to Medium, Marcin spent a year as a fellow at Code for America, helping with criminal justice technology and bringing urban design closer to people. He designed his first typeface in 1995 and he’s very glad he lost all the files in a subsequent hard drive crash, because boy, it didn’t look very good (his words, not ours).
Modern Layouts: Getting Out of Our Ruts
With new CSS properties for layout landing in browsers, we may be about to see a renaissance in layout design patterns. Jen will show is how we can better use the space inside the glass rectangles, including a multitude of practical examples of what’s newly possible.
Jen Simmons is a designer who builds stuff, too. She’s the host and executive producer of The Web Ahead, a podcast about changing technologies and the future of the web. Creating websites since 1996, Jen designs innovative sites and products using the latest web technology, pushing the envelope of what’s possible.
The Future of Responsive Typography
As web typographers stick with low-level hacks and antiquated standards, some of the most important elements of typography still aren’t addressed on the web of today. Nick will explore the unrealised potential for context-specific type, and how it might influence responsive design in the future.
Nick Sherman is a Brooklyn-based typographer and typographic consultant, having previously worked at Font Bureau, Webtype, and MyFonts. Nick is a co-founder of Fonts In Use and a columnist at A List Apart. He serves on the board of directors for the Type Directors Club, and the artistic board for the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. He is also a skateboarder, pizza enthusiast, and printer.
Designing Typefaces for Screens
In recent years, Dalton Maag have increasingly been designing typefaces for use primarily on screens, including the Amazon Bookerly fonts. Bruno will talk about the design, development and testing of these fonts, and how the process and requirements differ from primarily print fonts.
Bruno Maag is a Swiss type designer and founder of type foundry Dalton Maag. He has worked and lived in London for two decades. Bruno is a hugely charismatic and opinionated speaker, and is currently investigating type and emotion, with a special interest in the physiological aspects.
Chinese Design for Westerners
Designing for the Chinese market can be quite tricky for Western designers, especially if they are tasked with adapting a website that was designed for Latin alphabets to one using Chinese characters. Lu will talk through the crucial differences between Chinese and Western web design, from layout and colour, cultural aspects, through to a lack of italics and gigantic character sets.
Lu Yu is a designer with a focus on screen design and branding. Previous clients include Siemens, Unilever, Danone. She was raised in China, lived and worked in Melbourne, in 2014, she moved to Istanbul where she now works for Studio Recode.
Designing Pelican Books
Pelican books offer one of the very best on-screen, responsive, reading experiences to be had anywhere. Matthew designed both the online experience and the physical paperbacks at the same time. He will tell us the story of this integrated approach.
By day Matthew works for Penguin Books, designing book covers for non-fiction and classics titles. In his spare time Matthew makes animations, illustrations, websites, and anything else that tickles his fancy. In recent years Matthew has won a not just D&AD Yellow Pencil, but also a Cornish pasty eating competition.
Think Outside the Font
We are all type consumers and type is woven into the rituals of our everyday lives. Sarah will explore the psychology of typefaces, presenting practical, factual and research-based information about type; how it creates a first impression and can alter perceptions.
Sarah Hyndman is an expert in multi-sensory typography and runs experiential type studio Type Tasting. She is also working on collaborative research with scientists at Oxford University whose ground-breaking research shows that, not only do we instinctively know what typefaces might taste like, but that fonts can also alter our experiences.
The Next Steps for Web Typography
We’ve come a long way with web typography since the dawn of web design, however, it sometimes feels as if the constraints of old still dampens our creativity. Marko will show us ways we can push typographic design on the web further, beyond the status quo of today.
Marko is designer who runs a ‘nano-scale’ web design studio called Creative Nights in Velika Gorica, Croatia, and the typography playground TypeTester. Marko is passionate about bringing typography into the idea of One Web.
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