TYPO SF - Report!

[Jared Benson]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I enjoyed seeing a number of you today at Typo SF! For those of you who were able to attend, what were your favorite speakers/moments?

[Joe Pemberton]

Met Oliver Richtenstein (@iA) in person.

Seeing Nick Shinn and Yves Peters and for the first time in years.

Petra and Joan!

[eriks]

Too bad I missed you, Joe and Jared!

[petra]

☺ it was lovely to see you!!!

[Nick Shinn]

Jessica Hische gave a great presentation.
She went a mile a minute and never missed a beat. And she can draw.

[Jared Benson]

Nick, Erik, I regret not getting time to catch up! Lost you both in the crowd.

[Nick Shinn]

We'll always have Typecon.

[Mark Simonson]

I was bummed that there were multiple tracks. I chose to stick to the main track in the big hall and catch the talks from the smaller hall on video (though they don't seem to be available yet). I enjoyed nearly all the talks I saw (I'd rather not mention the exception, except to say that one was not as interesting as I'd hoped). I liked that it had a broader focus than just type and fonts. But my favorite thing about conferences like this is seeing and talking to old friends and meeting new people. As always, there were some people I wanted to meet but missed the opportunity. There's always the next one.

[Nick Shinn]

Intellectually it was very interesting, but not much about type design.
What I will probably remember most is that the part of San Francisco where the conference was held has such beautiful buildings, old and new, but so many mentally ill people (and not just sketchy) on the streets—mingling with everybody else going about their business.

[jlt]

I was unhappy that I missed pretty much half the talks I had paid to see simply because the rooms were too small.

I enjoyed everything I saw and heard, and was very gratified that Typo/FSI staff promised that everything would be up on video, although I'm still waiting for that to happen.

The BBC presentation was interesting, Bierut was as always, and Jim Parkinson was amusing. Good to see lots of old friendly acquaintances like Nick and Mark and the San Francisco crew.

Yours

Joshua

[dezcom]

Too bad the second venue was so small, I didn't get to see Yves or anyone else there. I was happy to see Tiffany, Miguel, Paul, Jill, Petra, Yves, Mark, and Nick again and met a few new young designers. I missed the Punchcut guys and saw others from afar.
I found the presentations entertaining but did not learn much. Sure wish there were more talks about type and less "This is me" show and tell. I love San Francisco, crazy people and all :-)

[Mark Simonson]

Some of the talks are available for online viewing:

Tina Roth-Eisenberg (a.k.a. Swiss Miss)

Joshua Davis

Both of these were great. I confess that I hadn't heard of Joshua Davis since the early 2000s when I was enamored by Flash. He was one of the "experimental" Flash guys.

I was hoping that the talks that were on the secondary track in the smaller venue would be available later online, but it looks like they are only making the most popular talks available, the ones that were streamed live at the event.

[dezcom]

TYPO SF has put up a Flickr page at:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/typosf12/pool/with/7000816772/

[Mark Simonson]

And here's Mike Montiero's talk, about "bad" clients, which was great, but a little jarring to see immediately after Neville Brody's talk.

[jlt]

One thing that really bothered me: I had looked forward very much to Koi Vinh's talk, after being a fan of his work for some time. But I don't like paying money - a pretty good amount of money - just to sit through a product pitch. After Spiekermann's great introduction (which was, unfortunately, the high point of that session), we got one long commercial for a toy product Vinh has created, which apparently - like so many other toys - promises to help us be creative, or something; I'm not really sure.

I was and still am pretty offended by the fact that the organizers allowed him to blatantly pitch something that had nothing whatsoever to do with typography or much else for 45 minutes to people who really should have been paid for sitting through the commercial. It was completely and utterly out of place and the opposite of what conferences like this should be about.

Vinh could have talked about so much more - his time at NYT, his pioneering work with CMSes and grid-based css layouts, his thoughts on the future of online news, readability ... but instead of telling people about what anyone who is familiar with him would have wanted to hear, he tried to sell us on a toy that really has no bearing whatsoever on our businesses, careers, trades and/or (for most of us, I'll bet) our interests or hobbies.