Every year in fall, the conference crowd convenes at ATypI, one of the type world's main annual events. Now in its 52nd year, ATypI'08 | The Old and The New is being held in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. The beautiful Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace provides the setting of the conference. As usual the ATypI TypeTech/TypeTools Forum – a two-day event dedicated to font technology – preceded the main conference. I think one day I will have to attend because, even though it is specifically aimed at type designers, it provides fascinating insight into the inner workings of designing and producing digital fonts.

The main conference opened with a keynote presentation by Oleg Genisaretskiy, In praise of the letter, on the evening of Thursday 18 September. Unfortunately I missed it because my plane arrived quite late in the evening and I couldn't make my way to the conference venue in time. I did however manage to hook up with various friends and acquaintances still hanging around after the reception and joined them for a late supper. The night concluded with an enchanting boat tour under the 500 bridges of the Venice of the North.

St. Petersburg, Russia, Summer 2005 © Aleksey Smalianchuk

On a side note, anyone interested in a personal experience with the city should head over to Jürgen Siebert's excellent St.Petersburg diaries entries on the FontBlog. That is, if you read German of course, but then you probably read the FontBlog already, so why am I even mentioning this? Anyhow, even if you don't read German you should Babelfish it and do the effort because it is really worth it, even if some of it gets lost in translation.

On Friday morning a spot of bad news was announced in John D. Berry's Welcome and opening address: Robert Bringhurst and Erik Spiekermann, two major speakers, couldn't fulfill their speaking engagements due to personal reasons independent of their will. They were going to be replaced by Roger Black with a talk about type and the web, and Akira Kobayashi relating about his work with two type design legends Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf.

Although I will not be able to do live blogging, I decided I'd cut back a teensy bit on the socializing to try to be more timely with my reports. This will however have repercussions on my entries, because I don't know if I'll manage to get hold of pictures or illustrations. If I do though, if worst comes to worst I'll add them subsequently.

Catch you later.

More ATypI'08

ATypI'08 | Jerry Kelly and John Downer on Type Revivals

ATypI'08 | Nick Shinn Unveils his Scotch Modern

Header image:Church of the spilled blood in St. Petersburg, Russia, 2002

© Jan Van den Meerssche