ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

Dave Crossland
Dave Crossland Posts: 1,584
in Events
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 :) 
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Comments

  • Eli Heuer
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited September 19
    I’ll be there.
  • James Montalbano
    James Montalbano Posts: 158
    No way José
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,217
    edited 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
    James Montalbano Posts: 158
    edited 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
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited 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
    James Montalbano Posts: 158
    edited 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
    John Hudson Posts: 3,867
    edited September 22
    Different strokes, different folks, and all that.
    But yes, the coast north of Dublin is lovely.
  • Eli Heuer
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited 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
    James Montalbano Posts: 158
    edited September 23

  • Eli Heuer
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited September 24
    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.

  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 801
    edited September 26
    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
  • Eli Heuer
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited October 23

    Responding to John, I think ATypI made the right decision.

    A serious international professional organization needs to be able to bring together people who disagree.

    Where exactly is the line? Should Americans who voted for Trump be excluded from international conferences? What about people who supported the Obama administration despite its drone warfare program and the civilian deaths it caused?

    I'd rather see ATypI remain an international forum for type design and typography than become an organization where participation depends on passing an ever-changing political litmus test.

    I was involved in the font industry during peak woke 1.0, and what drives me crazy is that the people who are loudest about political issues completely outside the scope of the font industry are often complicit in some of the worst injustices within the industry itself—problems they actually have the power to do something about.

    Peter Thiel said something recently that resonated with me:

    “If you're evil, you're at least competent. And therefore, maybe you're actually kind of good because you're at least getting something done.”

    Evil is of course subjective, to many many people things that the western liberal elites of the font industry find perfectly normal could be considered evil. The global nature of global scripts I think demands that people with differing viewpoints work together and cooperate.

    I'd like professional conferences to be places where people can come together and actually do the work, and politics outside the scope of the task at hand is often used by people who can't do the work as a weapon against the people who can, and often as a weapon against people trying to break into the industry and actually make things better for users and consumers of type and type technology.

    Maybe ParaType is evil and bad, I don't know the details. But I do know that there is a huge wave of AI disruption about to hit the font industry, and mob justice and cancel culture are often more about gatekeeping an industry than the surface issues, where is the line between this and excluding an AI startup because they post on X and think Elon is kind of a good guy actually?

  • Eli Heuer
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited October 23
    The Theil quote is from a longer discussion, and I think the full point is very relevant to the kind of dysfunction I am warning against. The point is that in industries and cultures where this kind of mob justice takes hold, often the people that rise to power are the best at virtue signaling and playing political games, and competent people who get things done are pushed out for not saying the right shibboleths.
    “If you're evil, you're at least competent, and if you're evil, you're not bad. And therefore, maybe you're actually kind of kind of good because you're at least getting something done... I think it's better to be good than evil. I want to be very clear... but we have all these good versus evil debates and we're just we're full of badness, and so you're in a world where 99% of the businesses, companies, people, political leaders, business leaders are totally incompetent.”
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,867
    edited October 23
    ATypI was asked not to provide a platform to ParaType by Ukrainian designers whose home cities are subject to missile and drone strikes by a political regime that is both evil and incompetent. This was supported by over 300 international colleagues, many of them members or former members of the association, including former board members. This isn’t mob justiceor virtue signalling or shibboleth spouting: it is a specific request from people with a legitimate interest — these are the people whom ATypI has claimed in various ways for many years to represent —, who don’t think the association should be providing cover for a company that supports war crimes.
    One of the board members with whom I corresponded made what I consider an inaccurate parallel with US tech companies that sell products to the Israeli government, which for obvious reasons some people also think should be boycotted. The more accurate parallel, given ParaType’s CEO’s public celebration of the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia, is with companies that actively support illegal settlements and attendant violence in the West Bank, something that even governments that otherwise support Israel have found the moral backbone to sanction.
  • Eli Heuer
    Eli Heuer Posts: 14
    edited October 24
    Can you point me to an actual example of something ParaType did wrong? Not a second hand account of something that was said? The Obama administration was accused of war crimes by human rights organizations and legal scholars, primarily regarding its targeted drone strike programs and military support in foreign conflicts, and most of the US font industry still enthusiastically supports that administration.

    I am open to changing my mind about this!

    ParaType fonts are on Google Fonts and I think Adobe and Monotype MyFonts also: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif 
    Should we boycott Google, Adobe, and Monotype?
  • jfporchez
    jfporchez Posts: 7

    Good morning from France, Europe.

    I was disturbed by the management of this situation by the ATypI, an association of which I was a board member for a long time, then vice-president and president. I don't know all the current members of the board well, but in my time, every decision required a consensus and a vote for the most important ones. It isn’t an easy job to be on the board.

    We need to have that in mind. ATypI, once non-American, now follows American policy, different from that of the EU, which, for example, due to sanctions against Russia prohibits the trade in software (fonts are software), with Russia. In the long term, ATypI should move away from the US, which was a bad decision at the economic level as well as for legal matters.

    It is clear that since February 2022, Ukrainians have been undergoing an invasion and deserve our support. The solidity of the Ukrainian people is exemplary. Ukraine protects our Europe, even if we are regularly "attacked" by Russia.

    Judging the Russian citizen by their public statements is difficult. Speaking out in a dictatorship is risky, but it does not mean that all Russians are against the war in Ukraine. Should all companies publicly support Putin's regime?


    The topic is the management of call for entries by ATypI board.


    I quote this excerpt published in 2025 on the site to announce a new mandate, a classic message that wants to be open to all:
    “to make ATypI more globally connected and more relevant to emerging voices, both at conferences and beyond. This means growing our presence in underrepresented regions, engaging younger generations, supporting education and research, and building stronger bridges across scripts and cultures—while being honest about what isn’t working. And it also means more than statements of intent.”

    ATypI proposed in 2025 a call for contributions for two conferences in 2026, requiring an account with an American technology giant, no matter which one, but this is not a good message for a non-profit that wants to be independent. We can observe that no specific speaker admission rules are available. The ATypI board can therefore accept applications from Russia and Ukraine, as well many others countries.

    Can an American association invite Russian speakers? A quick search says:
    “Yes, there are sanctions against Russia due to the Ukraine war, which may affect how U.S. companies engage with Russian speakers. Companies should carefully review current sanctions to ensure compliance, as many dealings with Russian entities are prohibited.
    Prohibited Dealings: Many transactions with Russian entities are prohibited under current U.S. sanctions. Companies must ensure compliance to avoid legal repercussions.”

    We do not know if the ATypI has ensured that legally the association did not take any risk, neither for its members nor for the speakers and attendees of the ATypI 2026 Sharjah conference?

    On the other hand, we can observe that the ATypI seems to have ignored the calls of Ukrainian speakers, and would also have banned these people from interactions on certain platforms with ATypI accounts.

    The Ukrainian speakers, in protest, were right to decide to cancel their participation. They have no other choice, their relatives suffer Russian bombs every day.

    In conclusion

    Without more insight, we can conclude ATypI board has so far managed this situation very badly. And continues to mishandle what is happening, but it could change by the conference in Sharjah. This impacts all those who have links with ATypI, past, present. This also impacts the association in the long term. The board must react, be transparent and explain itself, and why not apologise?

    And above all, propose a mode of operation that will make this kind of thing not happen again. 

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