ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

Dave Crossland · September 18

I am still planning to attend ATypI 2026 Sharjah in around a month's time.

I am curious who else here is currently also heading there

Eli Heuer · September 18

I’ll be there.

James Montalbano · September 19

No way José

Thomas Phinney · September 21

But James, when was the last time you attended any type conference outside the NY area?

I was leaning towards going, but now undecided. New car and minor work on new house are consuming some money, while regular work and move prep need attention.

James Montalbano · September 21

@Thomas Phinney I haven't attended a type conference in or out of the New York area in years. IMHO they are all a giant waste of time and money.

Eli Heuer · September 21

It was just under 2k for flight/hotel/ticket, well worth it if it helps Runebender gain adoption as the best local-AI next gen font editor, or if I can get anyone interested in my neural network based OpenType alternative that fixes all the problems the Perso-Arabic script has with OpenType.

James Montalbano · September 22

@Thomas Phinney I believe the last ATypI conference I attended was in Dublin I dont recall the year.
Not only were the presentations dull, but the Pubs were surprisingly unfriendly.

But my tour of the coast north of Dublin was somewhat enjoyable

John Hudson · September 22

Different strokes, different folks, and all that.

But yes, the coast north of Dublin is lovely.

Eli Heuer · September 22

James, the fact that many type conference talks are bad or uninteresting to you just means the bar is low and you have something to add if you actually have new and interesting ideas.

I used to make similar complaints, but now I learned to just see opportunity.

“The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality—without exploiting them for fun and profit.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

James Montalbano · September 23

Eli Heuer · September 23

I made a post and there was some discussion about it. If anyone that is going is interested, maybe we could do a short informal brainstorming session on this at ATypI 2026 Sharjah? I did a lot of work with bablefont support in Runebender last weekend and I have thoughts, I am thinking about working on a UFO done right for the 2030s source format over Christmas break.

https://typo.social/@elih/117315792893205455

Now that every serious type designer will use custom tools and workflows they build with agents, the need for a UFO-like cross-platform, cross-application, human readable, future proof format for storing font data is more important that ever.

The glyphs format has been a disaster and is clearly no longer tenable.

Bablefont is not the answer, it adds complexity, and was created by the same short sighted engineering culture that created the Glyphs mess in the first place.

John Hudson · September 25

No, I won’t be attending.

Despite an open letter signed by more than 300 people and organisations, ATypI is proceeding with providing institutional cover and a platform to one of the principals of ParaType, a company active in Russia’s wartime economy, whose work is linked to the Russian state, including the security services that target both internal and external opponents of the murder regime. The CEO of the company has publicly celebrated the occupation and attempted annexation of Ukrainian territory.

Ukrainian speakers have withdrawn from the event in protest, and in solidarity with them I encourage other speakers and attendees to consider whether they should support the organisation at this time.

Vasil Stanev · September 25

I have never attended such conferences and intend to do so at a convenient time, preferably when the international situation has cooled off a bit. The tickets seem to be reasonably priced. As far, however, as I can infer from graphic design conferences, whether one should attend ot not depends on where you are along your design journey, at least in my opinion. Most of the design conferences I've been to were basically a series of presentations and a Q&A, which are all things that can be done digitally. True, nothing or almost nothing can substitute the live interaction and the feel you get for people you might potentially work with, but all of this can be done with some amount of digital interaction also. The bigger of a business you are, and the more experienced you are, the better deal your get from people that reach out to you themselves, so going somewhere in person might not be the best option, especially if you don't have the energy you had when you were young. I'm here speaking generally.
This year I was at the European Design Awards that was conveniently hosted in my city (Sofia, Bulgaria). I got the chance to see many beautiful images and presentations, and talked to many designers. The eye tires after decdes of beautiful images online... There was a very elegant type presentation in there that did, however, got ruined when the Q&A get political for some reason. At the same time, some younger designers on there probably got good business out of the face-to-face communication. So I have to agree with @John Hudson that it's different strokes for different folks. I'm here talking about graphic design conferences, but I don't think type design conferences are too diferent. I might be wrong. I think, personally, that regardles of background and affiliation, each person should strive to make their fonts production-ready, well fine-tuned, kerned, coded etc. Our work , if it's good, will probably outlive the current political and economic upheavals by centuries, so we should strive to get the most of the technical expertise our colleagues can give us, and be polite and collegial in return. This seems reasonable to me.
I'm adding some of her BEAUTIFUL work so the post isn't too text heavy (pun intended

https://www.instagram.com/bruneaulea/?hl=en

ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

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