ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

Anna Yakupova · October 29

ParaType is a Russian company, the part of it, we have to pay taxes to exist, sorry for that. as for me, i would prefer not to pay

Miles Newlyn · October 29

ATypI Sharjah: An international design conference held in state with an absolute monarchy with no democracy, no free speech, heavily restricted religious freedom, criminalized homosexuality, incomplete legal equality for women, no freedom of assembly, and an active death penalty.

boycott? naaaa.

Dave Crossland · October 29

Personal opinion not the views of my employer etc; but I should mention I have some influence over the sponsorship by my employer of the event; and I am currently at the event in question.

Not attending one event of an international organization that holds it's events around the world, because one finds the location of the one event distasteful or worse*, makes sense to me.

However, since the call for boycott is now for the organization itself, it seems to me there would be something odd about an "international" organization existing as such, if it only to hold it's events in Western Europe.

Is that what you mean, Miles?

If one runs an event always in the same city as calls the event "Typo$CITY", that's obviously not a problem: It says what it is on the tin. There's not really any valid criticism I can see about that. It's unfortunate that there is a rich history of such events only in Western Europe (that I'm aware of), but the main solution I see is for people to run such events in their local area -- and this is increasingly the case. It's also good that international organizations run their events all over. I myself ran the Crafting Type workshop events all around the world in part because I wanted to see more type design education being available in places where there was none, myself growing up in a rather provincial place where I was frustrated by the (lack of

) local culture in my own interests.

If an international organization like atypi, Unicode, w3c or my own small thing was to develop a list of desirable candidate locations from which to call for offers to host it's events, and to have a policy of rejecting any proposals for locations not on the list, well, what criteria should be used to construct the list?

Or if the list is inverted, I can see that locations where people may be punished upon return (like Cuba for USA residents) could be blocklisted, along with active warzones.

Aside from that, to support people who do boycott particular locations for any personal reason, I also believe such organizations ought to prefer locations that can handle hybrid participation, and raise funds and allocate them to hybrid participation systems that work well, and obviously from me it's ideally done using libre software; the Chaos Computer Club has enabled the Libre Graphics Meeting to do this for many years.

(*not to minimize how dangerous many places are to many people's liberties - just saying the line we each draw starts somewhere, and may be shorter of such danger; I'm not keen to attend any event in Las Vegas, despite living in the USA... Sorry nevada friends

)

Nadine Chahine · October 29

ATypI Stanford: An international design conference held in state where children are regularly gunned down at their school desks, and people go bankrupt if they get sick. A state that is actively funding a genocide and has caused 4.5-4.7 million deaths since 2001 according to a study conducted by Brown University.

If we are going to assess every location via a political lens then we need to do so equally, and without filter. And we probably end up going nowhere.

For the sake of clarity, I am strongly opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as well as any attempt at geographic expansion via force.

This might be a helpful thing to keep in mind: We have international law and international institutions like the ICC and ICJ to arbitrate on complex questions of politics. In this case, Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 and later the rest of Ukraine in 2022 is illegal and unlawful. If we ever need to take a position, then looking to international law for guidance would be impartial and fair.

Finally, ATypI has been less of an association and more of a conference organiser for many years now. If the community wants ATypI to become active as an association (leading policy debates, discussing important industry and trade questions etc) then this requires a re-think of who runs for the board and what ATypI's mandate is.

Miles Newlyn · October 30

Nadine Chahine said:
If we are going to assess every location via a political lens then we need to do so equally, and without filter. And we probably end up going nowhere.

But nobody said "If we are going to assess every speaker via a political lens then we need to do so equally, and without filter." did they?

The hypocrisy in the 'creative' communities sickens me.

Simon Cozens · October 30

Apropos ATypI being a conference organiser and less of an organisation, I started thinking "how could I get conferences in the places I think there should be conferences?" To run something as big as an international conference, ATypI relies on soliciting viable proposals from interested locations, where there is a sufficiently committed ground team to make it happen. But that's quite a reactive approach that favours already resource-rich environments.

It struck me that a more proactive approach would be for the primary work of ATypI not to be running a big annual conference, but facilitating and developing grass roots typographic communities in underserved areas, including but not limited to putting on smaller local events to resource these parts of the world. If the local typographic communities are confident and vibrant, international conferences are a natural side-effect. (BITS, Diatipo, Letrastica being obvious examples.) You get the same outcome in a more sustainable way, plus a lot more local benefit.

Easy for me to say, of course; I don't have any capacity to make it happen...

Dave Crossland · October 30

Well yes Simon, nothing wrong with Typo Berlin, Type Paris, Typographica or BITS or TypeCon being city or national scoped events. But the question here is about expressly international organizations.

Atypi did run a series of "working seminars" somewhat recently, I attended the one in Sri Lanka.

Simon Cozens · October 30

I think there are multiple questions, and I was answering the "where should ATypI be focusing its attention?" question, not the much harder "how do we run an international organisation?" question. I actually did some research on this some years back, and it certainly helped me frame my answers to both these questions.

For the first question, one of the key things I learnt (actually from SIL International) was "report impact, not activity." Voluntary organisations with a clear mission can fall into the trap of thinking about what they did, emphasis on the "did" and emphasis on the "they"; but that might not be the best way to achieve that mission. Facilitating and developing others gives you more impact for the same effort. Hence, build communities not conferences.

For the second, I found that the best international organisations had a clear set of values which they used to guide their decision making. They often referred to their values as part of decision making, and these values were communicated frequently and widely. So if you have a value of inclusivity, then you don't do things which exclude others, or if you have a value of impartiality, then you treat each person on their individual merits, but you probably can't have both. Clearly communicated values (which you stick to) makes decision making much easier and also predictable on both sides; you know what to do, and people know what to expect of you.

John Hudson · October 30

ATypI is an organisation that was founded within a particular industrial business context, to serve the interests of the companies involved in that business. I attended my first ATypI Congress (then the official title, not ‘conference’) at the very tail end of that period, when the business as it had existed for most of the history of the association had ended: a lot of the original companies were gone, new players from the software industry — an entirely different business — were showing up, as were a lot of independent and designer-led foundries, and leadership of the association was shifting from Europe to the USA. Discussions were beginning to take place about ‘the future of ATypI’, but one thing I don’t recall is anyone asking ‘Does ATypI need to have a future?’

During the time I was most actively involved, on the board, and involved in organising the Vancouver conference in 2003, ATypI was always on the verge of bankruptcy. For most of its history, it had been bankrolled by the member companies. Now it was entirely dependent on being able to successfully mount an annual conference, and if anything went even a little bit wrong, the association could collapse at any moment. Notably, things went very wrong in 2002, leaving the already planned Vancouver conference with no up-front budget. The association had to let go its long-time executive director and event organiser, and Cynthia Batty stepped in to perform that role as a volunteer. With her, we managed to pull together a conference in Vancouver by calling in a lot of favours. It took another few years before the association became reasonably stable, but still entirely focused, year-to-year on the annual conference: the conference had become, at once, the thing that the association existed to do and the thing it must do in order to exist.

In that context, I think the name and the history are equal parts brand equity and baggage. The brand is established and now firmly associated with the conference. People talk about ‘going to ATypI’, meaning attending the conference. The baggage is the stuff that the association inherited from its history, some of which felt peculiar for a conference organising entity, and some aspects of which appear to have been shed or downplayed in recent years: a membership, an AGM, a set of formal statutes, national delegates. Like the question “Does ATypI need to have a future?’, I don’t recall anyone asking ‘Do we need to keep having/doing these things?’

Jean François might be chuckling in response to Simon’s post about the best international organisations having a clear set of values, because ATypI used to have a set of values so clear they were written down in the statutes. I was instrumental in getting rid of those portions of the statutes, because they were very much baggage and the values they stated were problematic. In the early 2000s, one of the possible futures for ATypI briefly seemed to be taking a formal role in font technology standardisation, and this was actively discussed by some people. On the fringe of a meeting regarding XML representation of sfnt font data, someone from Adobe — I won’t name names — asked me if I thought ATypI would be able to assume ownership of the OpenType specification, and indicated that Adobe might support that. With that notion in mind, Adobe’s lawyers did what few other people appear to have done: they read the ATypI statutes. And what they concluded was that ATypI was a cartel, and that not only could Adobe not be involved with standardisation via Adobe, but Adobe personnel probably should not be attending these ‘congresses’, or participating in any ATypI meetings, and the company should not be sponsoring the organisation. As I say: baggage.

In 2004, in consultation with Adobe’s lawyers, Cynthia Batty and I identified the portions of the statutes that were problematic, and at that year’s congress in Prague, the AGM voted to remove them. This included the Code Morale section — ATypI’s statement of values —, in which the members of the typesetting machine manufacturer cartel had formalised their agreement to cross-license a new typeface design within 15 years of publication, after which any member company was free to copy the design. The values weren’t great.

At the time, when presenting to the AGM the case for removing the problematic parts of the statutes, I suggested that the association could replace the Code Morale with a new clause that expressed the current values and commitments of the organisation. That doesn’t appear to have happened in the intervening couple of decades. The association has adopted a ‘Code of Conduct’, but this is for attendees at its events, not e.g. conduct of member viz their business activities, or conduct of the board in its decision making.

ATypI has changed considerably over the past twenty years. I am not involved, so can only comment on the current association from the perspective of someone who has attended a couple of recent conferences, and who observes the outcomes of the board decision making, not the processes.

Boris Melnichenko · October 31

Hi everyone, thank you for this discussion.

Since I’m new in here, here’s a brief introduction. I am a sociologist, originally from Moscow, living in exile in Paris. I just defended a PhD on graphic, type and web-design in Russia. A large part of the thesis is about ideological radicalization of some pro-regime designers after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More info is here: https://theses.fr/s260543

My research focuses on ideological drift within Russian design, including what I would describe as cases of fascisation. After six years working on this subject, let me be brief: I support the open letter by Ukrainian designers and the points Oleksandra Korchevska-Tsekhosh and Oleksii Chekal make in it.

I take seriously Oleksandra’s point that it is Ukrainians who are now bearing the cost of this “politicisation” of the ATypI conference. As someone who opposes the war and the current regime in Russia, I know a version of that cost: I am systematically excluded from professional communities in Russia for exactly that reason.

I will be honest: I am frightened to see Anna Yakupova of Paratype taking part in this discussion in such a hypocritical fashion. She is known for publicly supporting the invasion of Ukraine, yet here she presents herself as speaking in a personal capacity. In my view, this amounts to appropriating the freedoms and legal protections available in the West, while in Russia she regularly appears in professional groups that I would categorise as fascist. And to be clear: she appears as a Paratype representative in there.

By “fascist,” I mean something precise: a far-right ideological position combined with an industrial and administrative coalition sustained by support of paramilitary, military and repressive structures.

This may sound like an overstatement, so let me be concrete.

Imagine a group whose admin is Vyacheslav Pravdzinskiy, head of the “state design” division at the Senezh Management Centre, an active supporter of Putin for years, and the author of the coat of arms of occupied Kherson. A group in which someone can write “Ukraine should be destroyed” and receive the reply “proud and loud ”. Or a group that shares Anton Belikov’s publications on “White Russia.” Belikov was a close associate of Daria Dugina, the far-right philosopher and daughter of Alexander Dugin, Putin’s ideologist. She was killed in 2022 and Belikov after that decided to go to the front. Now he’s a former soldier, who occupies major public platforms through exhibitions such as the one at Zaryadye (it’s just near the Kremlin).

I could go on: Sergey Gurov, a Paratype partner, fundraising for FPV drones; or other projects in the same group like branding for attack FPV drones; far-right movements such as Russkaya Obshchina and Sorok Sorokov. Not to mention the group’s other admin, Artem Geller, also a Paratype partner, who now takes part in events of the Putinist party and appears on “anti-fake” shows on Russian propaganda channels.

This is not about “every Russian citizen.” We are talking about a very small group — a few dozen professionals — who actively support the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the current regime, and who work with the most visible ideological centres of putinist power while that invasion continues.

They also derive concrete and substantial economic benefits from the invasion and political repressions: by occupying spaces vacated by exiled professionals and departing Western companies, and by capitalising on propaganda, political repression and ethno-nationalist legislation such as the new law mandating the Cyrillisation of all public signage in Russia.

Paratype takes part in these industrial and political coalitions, as, unfortunately, do other colleagues, including Alexandra Korolkova, who regularly appears at events alongside Vyacheslav Pravdzinskiy and Artem Geller.

To give one concrete example: I once asked Paratype directly about their partnership with Sergey Gurov, and specifically how they respond to Gurov’s use of the KTF font. This is not only a matter of personal opinion; it is also a matter of platform and promotion. Gurov designed the logo for Pervye (Putin’s youth movement) and has contributed to crowdfunding for FPV drones. And guess what? This is how I discovered that all of them are friends, since after my comment in Paratype channel I was dealing with Yakupova, Pravdzinskiy and Geller.

Pravdzinskiy collaborated with Paratype on the Izh-260 type. Geller is connected to the Golos type. And whenever I post anything online, the accounts that reliably engage with my posts are those of Pravdzinskiy, Geller, Yakupova and Denis Zolotarev, design director of Russia Today.

The contrast with others in the field is stark. Those who refuse complicity are losing income, declining commissions, withdrawing from public events and refusing state-mandated technologies, and many are emigrating or leaving the profession altogether. Paratype, by contrast, collaborates with the most politically engaged state projects and corporations, occupies public platforms and contributes to state applications.

Nadine Chahine · October 31

Thank you Boris for this info. It's horrifying...

Stephen Coles · October 31

@Anna Yakupova, do you confirm that you support Russia’s annexation of Ukraine territories, as has been reported?

Anna Yakupova · November 1

I don’t support the annexation. I support the decision of people who live there. Any their decision. And it’s my last comment here, because i’m not gonna comment Mr. Melnichenko, the professor of fact manipulation and lies

Maurice Meilleur · November 1

Anna Yakupova said:

I don’t support the annexation. I support the decision of people who live there. Any their decision.

If I’m not terribly mistaken, the ostensible ‘decision of the people who live’ in the invaded and occupied regions of Ukraine is a core element of Putin’s/the Russian state’s justification for the invasion in the first place. This is a bad-faith answer with a long and ugly historical pedigree.

John Hudson · November 1

A large portion of the population of Ukraine, particularly in the east, are native Russian speakers, and the Moscow regime has spent a long time encouraging those people to think of themselves as Russian rather than Ukrainian. Most obviously, they did this by issuing them with Russian passports, but also by subtler policies such as encouraging tax-free cross-border shopping.

The reason why there are so many Russian speakers in parts of Ukraine is, of course, part of the history of the Russian empire and particularly linked to mass immigration into the industrial areas during the Soviet period. [A contextual parallel would be the large-scale immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet, incentivised by the CCP.] The eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was the capital of the Soviet Ukrainian republic through the 1920s and early 1930s, and the primary language spoken there remained Russian, even though the population of the city became majority Ukrainian during the same period due to migration from the famine-stricken countryside. The movement of populations is a major part of the history of Russian imperialism in Ukraine (cf. the systematic depopulation of the Crimean Tatars, and their replacement by Russians under both Romanov and Soviet rule).

Despite the efforts of the Moscow regime, there are large numbers of people whose first language is Russian who think of themselves as Ukrainian, not Russian, and who do not want to be ruled from Moscow (notably, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who grew up speaking Russian at home). There are Russian speakers among the displaced population from eastern Ukraine, and among the refugee communities here in Canada and elsewhere. So when talking about the decision of the people who live in the occupied areas of Ukraine, we’re talking about the people who remain there, those who are willing to speak out or campaign on the subject — knowing what happens to those who dissent —, and those who trust in a referendum process orchestrated and managed from Moscow.

jfporchez · November 1

This open discussion on TypeDrawers is interesting, the community expresses its doubts here about what happening since a couple of weeks in the context of organisation of ATypI 2026 Sharjah conference. But the initial topic isn’t how ATypI manages the call for entries for the conferences?

Are the rules of ATypI compliant with US law and the current sanctions against Russia?

How does the board (sorry guys, I know you’re not in an easy situation) communicate about this and about mistakes pointed out by its community?

And above all, to explain themselves regarding the possible failures in 2026. Because the less ATypI speaks, the less the board legitimises the association’s representation in the future.

Sharjah conference is now closed and still no reaction.

Eugene Sadko · November 1

I didn't go to ATypI 2026 Sharjah. And about ten other members of the Ukrainian type design community didn't go either, because we are serving in the Ukrainian army. Not because we love war, but because Ukraine was attacked by the world's largest terrorist organization, which, thanks to nuclear weapons and corrupt politicians around the world, forces everyone to regard it as a state. Every month, the war of aggression waged by this so-called russia kills ten times as many people on Ukrainian soil as the internationally recognized terrorists killed in the US on September 11, 2001.

Around 15% of Ukrainian actual type design is involved in defending Ukraine against russian genocide, if counted by designers and their typefaces, and over 50% if counted by market share. Ukrainian designers are forced to fight this war not only culturally, but physically as well.

Even before the war, so-called russia had a global monopoly on Cyrillic type design, thanks to colonial cultural policies, propaganda, and other forms of soft power. And the full-scale russian war leaves Ukrainian designers no time to make typefaces or talk about them at international events.

And today, thanks to the immoralism of organizations like ATypI, this evil empire has even more opportunities to promote its typography to the world than before the invasion! The world badly lacks the free, decolonizing voice of Ukraine, a place where Cyrillic writing was used long before Muscovy even existed. This concerns not only typefaces, but every kind of design and art – all of culture!

Ukrainian designers are busy fighting, volunteering, surviving, or struggling for their culture, while ParaType employees use one hand to pay taxes that, without exception, go toward supporting genocide against Ukraine and a bloody dictatorship against the oppressed peoples of a "russian federation" without federalism. And they extend their other hand to an audience so interested in hearing about typefaces and design outside politics.

And with both hands they make custom typefaces for various representatives of the Kremlin regime, as well as typefaces for sale worldwide through international marketplaces. Although paying taxes to the Kremlin is a choice, not force majeure. Everyone in russia has the example of Garry Kasparov, who calls things what they are and doesn't invent excuses for supporting the ruscist regime.

I also remember ATypI Paris 2023, when ATypI published recordings of almost every conference presentation, except for mine and Oleksandra Korchevska-Tsekhosh's. Neither of us went off topic. We simply didn't avoid talking about the damage russia's war is doing to Ukraine and its culture, and about russia's colonial influence on Cyrillic type design.

Here is the text of my talk, 21st Century Ukrainian Society and Fonts: https://rentafont.com/blog/21st-century-Ukrainian-society-and-fonts

And the text of Oleksandra Korchevska-Tsekhosh's talk, Why We Don't Know Anything About the History of Ukrainian Design, whose recording ATypI also never published: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ezkiS_cla3wMSxwFRcyZWepabq1Grp4Jo2Wc6Mz2GKA/edit although both talks were livestreamed without any cuts.

I still have no direct evidence that those recordings were deliberately withheld. At the time, there could have been technical or organizational reasons. But considering ATypI's attitude toward the russian speaker at Sharjah 2026 and its disregard for a perfectly polite open letter from the Ukrainian design community, signed by more than 300 professionals from around the world: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bekSD3Vb6VWGjr4SfuDMZY7ooXlPal7mkAevmRFtmhk/edit

Now it's hard for me to see this as an innocent coincidence.

Nadine Chahine · November 1

If it's any consolation, ATypI also did not publish my 2 font business talks and panel from Paris 2023 even though they were so full people sat on the floor.

Given that the conference in Sharjah is now done, it would be desirable for the board to make a statement explaining the decision-making process. I know it couldn't have been easy because the moment you bring in politics to the discussion, a world of complications opens up. But let's give them a chance to breathe and return home. Hopefully in the coming days we will hear more.

In the meantime, ATypI members will need to ask themselves these questions:
- Do we want to take positions on armed conflicts?
- As a multi-national org, how can ATypI navigate the many conflicts taking place today? There are many instances where neutrality is equivalent to taking the side of the oppressor.
- Is there a mechanism through which members can have a say on certain decisions? Ie, is there a space to challenge and dissent should the board take decisions that a significant portion of the members oppose? If not then there is a democratic deficit and this would need to be rectified.

James Montalbano · November 2

Perhaps the future of the organization would be to foresake all geographic and country affiliations and become completely on-line. It would have to figure out a new revenue generating source, given it has relied on conference fees as a major funding source. Membership dues perhaps?

Dave Crossland · November 2

ATypI also did not publish my 2 font business talks and panel from Paris 2023

I was not aware of this, but this doesn't really surprise me - given the 2003 lawsuit (https://johndberry.com/atypi-history/a-legal-interlude/), and what John wrote in this thread about a long time ago BEING A CARTEL, lol

Last month I became aware that Unicode Conference doesn't record and publish presentations, and I guess that's momentum from a pre-social-media/easy-video age, because tech company legal departments recommend against it. From that perspective, why create risk?

So, I think its reasonable that the organization would take seriously some possible liability risk around publishing recordings of talks on business topics for which it didn't vet the slides or spoken materials before hand, yet could be liable for as a publisher.

It doesn't seem ideal to me if this was never anticipated and disclosed to someone before, or even after, though. But then it is almost entirely volunteer driven organization, and for myself I tend not to pay any attention to the organization most of the year, given it is mainly about its 1-2 times a year conferences; so I can understand if that is due to a simple a lack of time and attention, post-event.

Still, given that you could re-record the presentation and publish it on your own channel, I wonder if you did so if then the ATypI web team could link to it on the program page (ie. the concurrent event with https://atypi.org/presentation/font-pricing-primer/ which has no video was https://atypi.org/presentation/script-meets-tech-responses-to-materiality-in-some-ancient-and-medieval-letterforms/ which does have a YT video embedded; the former page could link to a 3rd party's publication.)

John Hudson · November 2

[Off-topic.]

@Dave Crossland
It wasn’t the practice to record presentations at the old format Unicode conference, but videos from the more recent Unicode technology workshops have been published.

Nadine Chahine · November 2

@Dave Crossland The only entity that would be annoyed with my talks is Monotype. Indeed, I was told that the CFO got up and left during the panel when I was saying that foundries should have the right to set their own pricing and business models. I doubt Monotype has grounds to sue given that all I said was factually accurate, and for what we would find out in discovery. I can understand that ATypI might not want to upset a major sponsor, which is why I never challenged the decision. Though I do feel it would have been in people's interest to be able to see the recordings. I can always re-record but it would miss the dynamics and Q&A. The topics are now incorporated into our font business seminars so the info is not lost.

The question of what ATypI should be to its members is one that is interesting to discuss, because we as a species are facing multiple existential crises and the power of design can amplify messages that need to be amplified. To do that we need international organisations to link us, and to serve as a space to discuss the future of the industry, and to play an active role in shaping that future. The current iteration of ATypI falls short, mostly because it is a volunteer board that needs to pull off a large conference in a new location with a new set of hosts each year and to somehow remain viable financially. This is quite a challenge in the best of times.

Many will have a knee-jerk reaction to the poor communication around the calls to boycott but there is a long history to ATypI. Lots of baggage and some rather shady bits of history but it is still the only org dedicated to type design. We do perhaps need an online general assembly to discuss how to move forward as a community and how ATypI can be more responsive to the membership. At the heart of this is finances so let's please keep our feet on the ground.

ATypI 2026 Sharjah – who is going?

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