#ampconf

Ampersand Conference 2015 roundup   |   Londondesignz.com

After a year’s hiatus, Clearleft’s Ampersand Conference returned to Brighton with another event focussed on web based typography, and a packed day of inspirational speakers. Despite the seemingly niche focus, I think it would appeal to a wide range of people interested in broader typography and lettering — I had a great time and learnt lots, so do keep an eye out for future events. Here’s a quick summary of the talks plus a few of my own favourite moments.

Down with web typography, Indra Kupferschmid Indra provided some very in depth pointers for type on the web in different scenarios, looking at different kinds of content and what the typographic requirements and considerations were for each.

To hell for type, Marcin Wichary Marcin designs for medium.com where his self instigated mission is to bring world-class typography to its readers, meaning a lot of inventive thinking to break out of the restrictions of the web and its underlying technology. This usually relies on a wild range of blatant hacks. To paraphrase Marcin, nothing good ever happens when you use ‘auto’ in typography!

Incidentally, I’ve just noticed that he’s posted a great article about one of the anecdotes he touched on during his talk — specifically about how an ancient Windows font predating the web came back to haunt medium.com. So taken with its reappearance, that he created a little easter egg — to turn it on, go to the Medium homepage or search page, search for C:\WINDOWS (all uppercase!), and press Enter.

Modern layouts: Getting out of our ruts, Jen Simmons Some great thinking from Jen who is encouraging us as designers to break out of the confines of lazy web designs and standard page layouts by experimenting with tools that are available today.

The future of responsive typography, Nick Sherman Historically, type was made for specific reasons or particular applications, but in digital era typefaces could be used to do things they weren’t intended for. Nick discussed the issue and possible solutions around context specific typography and the technical roadblocks to doing it efficiently without resorting to loads of hacks.

Designing typefaces for screens, Bruno Maag Perhaps not surprisingly at an event like this, Font Hinting reared its head several times during the day (it always does at Ampersand). Swiss type designer Bruno Maag could write a thesis on the subject. He confesses that he likes pixels, black and white, even yes and no as it all makes things simpler, but the challenge of designing type for screen is the presence of anti-aliasing and RGB. With this in mind, he took us through designing for Kindle.

Chinese design for westerners, Lu Yu Lu Yu provided a great overview of the challenges of designing for web in China. Areas touched upon included the differences between Western and Chinese culture, the variety of reading directions in Chinese languages and the vast range of characters in the Chinese character set.

Designing Pelican books, Matthew Young Matthew designs Pelican books; both the physical paperbacks and their digital equivalents.  He pointed out that each new reading format tended to copy aspects from older ones (I’m guessing to help readers of these new forms to feel a sense of familiarity in these unfamiliar environments). For example, early ebook designers mimicked physical books with pseudo page turns and similar items that might not be so appropriate for the newer medium with hindsight. While digital formats such as ebooks should avoid literal copying of printed books, designers still need to strive for consistency across platforms.

Think outside the font, Sarah Hyndman Typetasting supremo Sarah Hyndman ran a great session peppered with games that backed up her on-going research into the psychology of type. She demonstrated how the shapes of fonts can change our perception of something for example actually making food seem to taste different.

We're very pleased to once again be sponsoring the Ampersand web typography conference. For the first time ever, Ampersand will be held in New York. Mark your calendars for 2 November 2013, and read on for details of a massive discount for Fontdeck customers.

Ampersand will be the usual fantastic one-day, single-track event put together explicitly for knowledgable web designers and type enthusiasts. You'll be able to immerse yourself in the nitty gritty details of all aspects of web typography, presented by world experts in typeface design, layout, typesetting, and front-end development.

Here's just a few of the faces who will be talking at Ampersand New York this year:

Jonathan Hoefler will be 'Putting the Fonts into Webfonts'

Mark Boulton will be discussing 'Typography in Responsive Design'

Luc(as) de Groot will be uncovering 'Readability Per Square Centimeter'

Jenn Lukas will be riffing 'On Icon Fonts & Working with Designers'

You can find more details of the full schedule of speakers and get updates from @ampersandconf, including an announcement of our final, very special keynote speaker.

Check out some previous speakers

To give a you a flavour of the Ampersand experience, the conference organisers Clearleft have just published some videos from this year's conference in Brighton. We've compiled them together here:

Get $100 Off!

As promised above, Fontdeck customers can get a whopping $100 discount off the standard price for Ampersand. Just use the promo code "FONTDECK" and you'll be sorted.

Ampersand Conference Today

The Ampersand Conference kicked off in a wet Brighton. So far we’ve had the amusing and informative keynote from Erik Spiekermann, an excellent talk from Gerry Leonidas on hierarchies, flow and semantics of online content then Mark Boulton took us through his thoughts on responsive typography.

Quick chat with Type Together

At the Ampersand Typography conference in Brighton, UK yesterday José Scaglioni & Veronika Burian, from the respected independent type foundry Type Together, gave a lecture on common typographic mistakes and the pitfalls of poor type choices.

I managed to catch-up with them briefly afterwards.