Category: ultramedia

For a few years now, I’ve been one of the instructors of the SVA TypeLab, a month-long summer type-design course at the School of Visual Arts. It’s always a great experience that keeps me on my toes and forces me to clarify how I think about type so I can properly coach designers learning more about it. Here’s a quick promo for the course, taken from a longer interview that’s part of a related online course called “The Complete Typographer“.

SVA TypeLab: Dan Rhatigan from SVA Summer Residency Programs on Vimeo.

SVA TypeLab faculty member Dan Rhatigan on the importance of breaking rules

While I was in Montreal last September to see friends and colleagues, talk about gay porn typography, and get a couple of new tattoos, I was asked to have a quick chat:

It may not come as a surprise that a lot of my job at this point is yapping about fonts. This talk took place on November 7, 2017 in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library as part of Type@Cooper West‘s Letterform Lecture Series. This recording was made possible by a generous sponsorship from Adobe Typekit.

Continue reading “Souped-up Font Formats”

Fastest upload ever! I just gave this talk earlier today at TYPO Labs in Berlin. I’ve barely slept for the last two days, so I’m surprised that I sound so lucid.

Since last September’s announcement of the new OpenType 1.8 spec, variable fonts have been moving from concepts and demos into practical solutions. This overview will summarize the progress made so far on new fonts, the environments that can support them, and what some designers have already learned to do with them.

Update: And here’s a nice montage of scenes and impressions from the event:

When I started at Adobe last September, the Adobe Type team had been hard at work for quite some time on a major project: Source Han Serif, a serif-style family supporting pan-CJK languages. This is a follow-up to Source Han Serif, but pushes the scope a little further than that project, particularly in that it turns out to have been the original story for Frank Grießhammer’s wonderful Source Serif, as well.

I didn’t do much for the project itself other than keep an eye on its progress while my better-qualified colleagues finished what they’d started, but thy were kind enough to let me talk about the work and how it fits in with Adobe Type’s overall mission, which IS my job to worry about.

For the last few Summers I have been one of the instructors for the SVA Type Lab, a 4-week course in typeface design here in New York. This year, we’ve been trying to promote the course with some cute short videos:

This talk took place on Saturday, June 18, 2016 in The Great Hall at The Cooper Union as part of Typographics.

Typographics 2016: The Blank-ish Page from Type@Cooper.

My summary from the program:

It can be difficult to explore possibilities of typography when designers—and especially clients—assume certain things are given, when these variables are not hard limits, just conventions. I want to look at the background of certain defaults of our software, to get people to consider them in some context and think about them more critically.