The Typographics NYC 2016 Lecture Series
As I announced in my previous report of the 2016 edition of Typographics NYC, certain common themes became apparent during the series of lectures, along with overarching threads. The first of these was problem solving in typeface design, more specifically optimizing fonts for screens, building connections in a script without using alternates, and tackling reverse contrast in a serif text face. ›
Typographics NYC 2016 Resounding Success
For ten days Typographics 2016 turned The Cooper Union in New York City into the epicenter of the type and typography world. The second edition of the annual conference was a resounding success. Attendance rate jumped from around 390 last year to almost 600 people and over 20 nationalities in the audience for the two days of lectures. Over two thousand viewers followed the presentations via live stream. ›
A party for Typographics, the magazine
As Typographics was under way last week, it coincided with the announcement of a new publication—and the launch of this site. Thursday, June 16, Adobe Typekit and Roger Black organized an evening of cocktails and conversations at the Astor Center Gallery to celebrate Typographics: The Magazine. Typographics intends to build bridges between type creators and type users, and also bridges in time. ›
Welcome to Typographics, the magazine
This site is the beginning of a new publication about type. The focus is you. A designer who uses type, a designers who creates it, or someone who just loves it. Or all three. We’re starting quietly, with a simple group blog. This fall we’ll publish a preview printed edition. The next six months we will try to prove the concept. And if we’re successful, we’ll start regular publication in 2017, with a quarterly print magazine and an active web site.
Let us know what you think! (And forgive my typos.) —Roger Black
A new magazine for and about people who love type
Typography is alive and well and growing. Once made of lead and confined to shops filled with machines, type is now everywhere: for example, on your phone. Once bound to printing, type has now taken on all kinds of letterforms: the messages in your car, on your music player, on the sides of trucks, on the tops of buildings. The designers of movie titles, the programmers for the web, the artists who make menus, all use fonts in the same formats. The word “type” has come to mean lettering everywhere. ›
The Politics of Typography
Elizabeth Carey Smith is the founder and owner of graphic design studio The Letter Office in New York City. A designer with a passion for type, she has taught graphic design and typography for the past five years at the City College of New York and NYU. Elizabeth graduated from the 2012 Type@Cooper extended program with Brightcut. She is an avid member of the typographic community, and one of the founding members of Alphabettes. ›
Catching up with Tobias Frere-Jones
Tobias Frere-Jones has built an impressive body of work, designing some of the most popular typefaces in the world—Interstate, Poynter Oldstyle, Retina, and Gotham to name but a few. 
Image from the AIGA NY Alphabet/City walking tour with Tobias Frere-Jones, September 2007. Photo by Michael Surtees. This recipient of the 2006 Gerrit Noordzij Prize and the 2013 AIGA Medal has the uncanny ability to distill letterforms that are part of our collective consciousness into type families with high aesthetic and technical quality. ›
Catching up with Indra Kupferschmid
This German typographer, author, and professor at HBKsaar switches topics from obscure pre-war German type foundries to onscreen rendering of fonts and type licensing in the digital age with astonishing ease. 
Indra Kupferschmid at Kerning Conference. Photo by Andrea Piffari. Last autumn she initiated Alphabettes.org in collaboration with Amy Papaelias. It is both a platform for supporting and promoting the work of all women in lettering, typography, and type design. ›
Yes, we attend other conferences
Last month I went to Typo Berlin, and while the name indicates it’s a type conference, it’s really a general design event. There was Jonathan Barnbrook on David Bowie, punk rock, and social responsibility. But then Ferdinand Ulrich convincingly presented the work of Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse as a vastly unde-appreciated type designer. TypoBerlin 2016 had something for nearly everyone. ›