The weather in Mexico City is pretty monotonous: there is a rain at least once a day. ATypI conference continued with a load of lectures. One of the most successful presentations was a story of the letter ñ by José Scaglione & Andreu Balius (published in TYPO #32). And what else?

José Scaglione & Andreu Balius

The second day started by a lecture by David Shields. He introduced huge collection of wooden letters from Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection. It includes almost 150 different fonts from the years 1828 and 1900. All typefaces are carefully organized and digitalized. You can enjoy the beauty of all the Tuscan, Italian or Slab Serif letter forms at the project website developed at The University of Texas at Austin.

Fabio Haag represents Dalton Maag (!) company in Brazil. This global company offers type related services. Haag’s brief lecture was intended mainly for students, he tried to motivate them and convince them that even in a country without deep typographic roots one can become a successful type designer. Unfortunately, there were not many students in the hall, although dozens of them registered at the conference. (Proofed by the number of tags waiting for the registered students on the front desk.)

The highlight of the second day was a lecture by Gabriel Martínez Meave who discussed general questions related to globalisation and the SPRV of this process. Meave pointed out that every global phenomenon was once local: Latin script was in the beginning the Roman type before it became the dominant global script which replaced all the local form of writing in Latin America — because “Letters are weapons. Beautiful weapons“.

Meave at AtypI Mexico from Tipocracia / Henrique Nardi on Vimeo.

As usual, some of the lectures attracted me more, some of them less. I wish some of the speakers could properly set the screen resolution on their laptops to avoid deformed letters on slides about legibility…

For some photos visit Flickr, short comments are on Twitter. In TYPO #38, we will feature more detailed and insightful view of the event.