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« Conferences & Cristoforo

Wow, it has just been a crazy time lately. I wrote most of this yesterday at 36,000 feet, on my way home from a quick tour of Europe for work: Barcelona, Paris, Hamburg and Munich. This included numerous customer meetings and three speaking engagements:

My “Type Detective” talk at Typo Week Barcelona

Now I have a break for a couple of weeks before my next conference, TypeCon in Milwaukee (Aug 1–5), where I’ll host a panel to talk about Kickstarter as a means of funding new type design. I’ll also be doing a talk on the same subject at ATypI in Hong Kong (October 11-15).

In the meantime, I have been hard at work in my off-​hours on my Kickstarter-​backed typeface, Cristoforo, with help from my fabulous intern, Andrea Harrison. The full details are available to my backers in an update on Kickstarter, but for public consumption, I’ll just say that work continues on the upright face, and has started on the italic, and I am predictably enough wishing that I hadn’t promised to add so much language coverage (central European, Greek, Cyrillic). But it’s coming along, and the extended language support offers some greater design challenges than just digitizing an old typeface.

My day job has kept me pretty busy, and has presented me with some one-​sided decisions. Gee, I have exactly one day free in Paris: work on Cristoforo, or visit the Louvre? Okay, so I’m probably not going to collect a lot of sympathy votes here. But after spending less than 48 hours in each of Paris, Hamburg and Munich, then flying back to Portland, I am pretty beat.

Finally, I need to thank my backers for Cristoforo! Without them I would not have tackled the typeface, or would have done something much less ambitious and done it more slowly. Here is the backer listing (and yes, some of these are pseudonyms, it’s whatever they use on Kickstarter).

5 commentsto “Conferences & Cristoforo”

  • July 19, 2012
    H James Lucas wrote

    Obviously you’re a little short on time to post, but is there any chance you’ll be writing about fonts for ebooks at some point when your travelling spree has subsided? Or more immediately, do you have any recommended reading on the subject?

  • July 19, 2012
    Thomas Phinney wrote

    I assume that you bring this up in reaction to the fact that I did a talk on this topic in Munich last Friday night?

    I will see about posting my slides somewhere. Unfortunately I do not have a lot of good recommended reading; the lack of good info on the topic all in one place is exactly why my talk seemed like a good idea! But I can come up with some links to useful sources nonetheless.

  • July 30, 2012
    H James Lucas wrote

    Yes—I would have loved to hear the talk. Whatever aspects you covered then would be great to read here!

  • August 7, 2012
    The Roach wrote

    Hi,

    Unfortunately I was much too late on joining the Kickstarter, as I didn’t know of it before. Is there any chance of getting the font license once it’s done, or is this going to remain Kickstarter-​supporters only?

  • August 7, 2012
    Thomas Phinney wrote

    Absolutely, the set of fonts will be made available at retail (and as web fonts via WebINK) when they are done. However, this won’t be until early next year! I am aiming for February, though with the growth in scope of the project (Greek, Cyrillic), it may take longer.

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