The venue for TYPO has been for many years the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (“House of the Cultures of the World”) also known as the “pregnant oyster”. It was originally a gift from the US after WWII.
I attended the presentation Emojis, hieroglyphs and typographic mega-niches. New from Unicode by Johannes Bergerhausen and Siri Poarangan. I learned quite a bit about the current state of Unicode, and how there’s much enthusiasm to add old/obscure languages to it. The presenters made an interesting point: adding languages means connecting a culture to the digital/internet realm. The Cherokee language recently became part of Unicode and is now usable on the iPhone. The presenters explain more at their site, DecodeUnicode.org.
Yves Peters, author of the FontFeed, brought his ScreenFonts blogs to life presenting on the typography of movie posters with great slides. I loved the pictogram alternative to Psycho.
Petr van Blokland presented Designer update: what’s next? on technologies that are relevant to designers today and for the future (HTML5, CSS3, cloud computing), and what’s obsolete (Flash, Word, InDesign).
Lots of attendees, especially students, relaxed and spent time at the drawing table with pens, paper, and blank t-shirts creating beautiful illustrations and lettering. The table had a stack of stencils of the font Fummel, made up of modules to construct any letter. Fummel is available for download on our Free Fonts page.
Did you go to TYPO? What was your experience?
2 Comments
It’s not Erik van Blokland but Petr van Blokland who did the presentation “Designer update: what’s next?”
Thanks for the correction Tania. I’ve updated the post.