ATypI 2018 returns to Antwerp with Type Legacies

The global typographic community is invited to ATypI’s sixty-second annual conference, in Antwerp, Belgium, September 11–15. There ATypI will celebrate more than sixty years of typographic education, heritage, technology, business, and camaraderie.

After a quarter of a century, ATypI returns to Antwerp for its 2018 annual conference. Belgium’s most populous city proper has a rich cultural history spanning centuries. It has played an important role in art, politics, and religion, and, more specifically, in the development of western typography.

Antwerp is the home of the Plantin-Moretus Museum, a unique institution which, in 2005, was awarded the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Besides housing the two oldest surviving printing presses in the world, an exceptional collection of typographic material, and an extensive library, the preservation of its entire commercial archives give an unprecedented insight in the business of book printing and typefounding since the sixteenth century.

The theme of ATypI’s 2018 conference is Type Legacies: honouring the heritage, designing type today.

“By honouring our heritage, we reflect on the rich tradition of type to gain insights into the contemporary practice and inspire the future. A deep understanding of typographic history guides us when we design and educate, when we draw and code, when we develop fonts destined for today and tomorrow. What came before becomes the foundation for our present realities and the inspiration for future possibilities. Principles from classical calligraphy can be applied to feature-rich fonts. Renaissance type making can be echoed in the proportions and metrics of contemporary fonts. And the superlative accomplishments of Plantin’s polyglot Bible of the sixteenth century can inform multi-language, multi-script solutions for increasingly globalised communities” notes ATypI of the typefest of September.