Typographics
I'm in New York! I'm living in a college dorm apartment on the Upper East Side. It's nothing glamorous, but it's in a nice area and the subway station isn't a far walk. I'm also walking distance from the Met and Central Park, so I visited on my first full day here. I had been to the Met a few years ago, but I was with my family so we didn't stay long. It was also before I took college art history classes so I didn't have the same appreciation for it that I do now. I got through a good chunk of the museum, but I'll definitely need to go back a few times to see everything. Afterwords, I noticed a L'Arte Del Gelato cart and couldn't help but get some—but only because Louise Fili designed their branding.
I also got myself a library card. It sounds nerdy but honestly I'm pretty excited about it. The first time I went to my local library I just worked on my computer, but I do plan on spending more time there and checking out some books. I also plan on visiting the Main Branch NYPL on 5th Ave soon.
I didn't waste any time before jumping into the design community! On Wednesday, my second full day, I went to a TDC event at Parsons School of Design, one of the colleges of The New School. Tobias Frere-Jones and Nina Stössinger both spoke. Stössinger talked about a typeface she designed that defies the rules by placing stress on the horizontal strokes. It was as much a typeface as a research project and an experiment, and the result is a beautiful, subtle, quite legible typeface. She talked about how some of the "rules" type designers follow can be restricting, and encouraged us to break the rules and not to be afraid of experimentation. Frere-Jones' talk was about the ways that letters in bank notes were used to prevent forgery. It was really fascinating; typesetters would do tricks like replacing "O"s with "0"s and filing off part of a double story "g" in order to differentiate real bills from those printed by forgers. It was also interesting to see how American dollars used to be so much more beautiful than they are today.
The next day was my first day volunteering at Cooper Union for the Typographics conference. Volunteering also means free passes into the conference. I helped set up on Thursday morning, then volunteered Friday and Saturday morning. I mostly worked as a runner, helping the A/V crew with whatever they needed (mostly finding people to relay messages) during the main stage talks. I was glad I was able to be in the auditorium and hear all the speakers. Included were Mike Essl from Cooper Union, Bobby C. Martin from Original Champions of Design, Lance Wyman, Gail Bichler from The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Keedy, and Ellen Lupton. On Friday night there was a cocktail party, and I had the opportunity to meet Ellen. She is the author of the first typography book (besides textbooks) that I bought for myself, Thinking with Type. I told her how influential it was on me being here today, and she thanked me and was very sweet.
*Disclaimer* The photos in the Great Hall were all taken on my phone from the back, so please excuse the poor quality.
I also met several other young designers, including a few that are currently in the Type@Cooper Extended program and some that will be my classmates tomorrow. Yeah—tomorrow. I'm so ready to begin the program and be in a studio again.
In the meantime, I need to figure out how to fit all the new free stickers I got on my laptop.