Spaced out

If you live in the Bay Area (or happen to be visiting next week) and have a passion for typography like I do, no doubt, you’ll be interested in Spaced Out, Black Holes in Typography, happening next Wednesday, 1 October at 7pm. Speakers include heavy hitters of typography Jim Parkinson, Mike Bartalos, and a former HotWired colleague, Max Kisman. (Ahem… just mentioning those three names in the same sentence makes me drool.) The event is $10 for AIGA members, $15 for non-members, and current students attend for free. The perfect teaser for the event:

With the constant mode of change and innovation going on, graphic design, typography and type design, will move along in fashion. The basic ingredient of written language, the alphabet, stays very much the same, but the way it looks, smells, tastes or feels, changes by the urgent need for new and different experiences.

The second book of a set, Indie Fonts 2, will be available for half-price — a steal if you know how cool the first volume is. If you can’t make the event, check out The Republic of Type’s FRISCO_REMIX, a sample font conceived by Max Kisman, with contributions from 34 type designers in the Bay Area. The font is downloadable for free until 31 December 2003.

(Tip: Contrary to what you may have heard — or now believe after seeing a font designed by locals with this name — it is usually neither acceptable nor cool to refer to San Francisco in normal conversation by the shortened slang, “Frisco”. No matter who or where you are, doing so is the quickest way to brand yourself as someone “outside the loop”. If you use the f-word in this City, taxi drivers have an immediate excuse to drop you off at the nearest tourist trap, where local residents will gladly take all your money for any of our kitschy Golden Gate or Transamerica souvenirs.)