Fearless Research
Typelab Day 1, Wednesday June 24th at 6pm CEST / 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific.

I am writing the first draft of this newsletter while enjoying a quiet breakfast by myself after 3 full days of talks, chats, beers, sun. Atypi Stanford 2026 in Palo Alto (California) just ended and I am happy and exhausted.

I am a big fan of type conferences: I've attended various ones since 2009 as a way to stay connected with friends and to keep track of what’s new in the type world. TypoBerlin was my favorite, for as long as it lasted. I love the unplanned component of meeting in person: being surprised by a speaker you knew nothing about, accidentally siting next to someone at lunch and start a conversation, finding out you have friends in common with someone you never met. It’s like opening a magazine you like and ending up reading something you didn’t know you were interested in.

I don’t call it networking. I don’t think friendships and lasting connections can grow from the «I want to talk to you because you could be useful to me» approach. Transactional relationships don’t work for me and getting used to those interactions has been quite an adjustment since I moved to the US. Not everyone is like that, of course, but it's so pervasive that it's considered normal. All my lasting connections began from genuine interest and informal chats—often over a drink—and I am lucky to call many of them friends now.

This Atypi edition showed once again that human connection is irreplaceable. The case for attending a conference—if type is not your thing, find one that interests you—is that there is nothing better than being in person. It was the necessary reminder that there are actually plenty of people like us and many out there are doing outstanding work, whether to help accessibility, support a community, or design tools for a language that is digitally underrepresented. The theme for this edition was «Homescreen: Design for Belonging» with the intent of exploring how typographic systems shape access, identity, and participation in the digital age.

Atypi and Silicon at Stanford (thank you Tom Mullaney and Audrey Gao) put together a great set of talks, workshops, and visits to the many collections of the university. Here you'll find just a small portion of what caught my interest.

One of my side projects is researching type history, so I was very excited to finally meet in person Ferdinand Ulrich, typographer and type history researcher based in Berlin. He was the Friday keynote speaker with the talk «The emergence of a new community» about typography conferences of the 1970s and 1980s and the type industry’s first steps towards digital technologies.

It was an impeccable talk in every aspect: the research, the delivery, the slide design (he’s an editorial designer and it shows), and the suit. Bravissimo.
A few interesting takes from his talk, especially meaningful if you are doing historic research too:

You can find on-line the talk he gave at Automatic Type Design 3, the conference organized by ANRT Nancy in 2025: «Digital type from the day before yesterday and tomorrow».

If you want to know more about the story of Atypi John Berry, fellow Seattleite and former president of the association, presented at the conference his book «Type is everywhere. A history of the Association Typographique Internationale». It's now available for everyone: go read it online!

The Dutch type foundry Typotheque—an advocate of rigorous research—keeps publishing extremely interesting work. I was very impressed last year at Face/Interface conference by Bridget Chase’s talk about Indigenous North American Type Research and I subsequently bough the book. Since I am based in Seattle I often have to set type in Lushootseed, the local indigenous language, and their research was interesting and useful.

The foundry recently released accessibility.tools, a free toolkit built for designers who want to create more inclusive work, backed by research. I was looking forward to the talk by Typotheque member Héctor Mangas «Dyslexia: Myths, Misunderstandings and Solutions» and it didn’t disappoint.

The argument he wanted to make is that, as designers, we need more peer-reviewed research to back up our decisions. That is true in general and specifically for dyslexia, a set of complex cognitive differences that no miracle typeface is going to solve. Héctor walked us through why some typefaces “designed for dyslexia” are popular but not actually effective, and what we should be doing instead.

Unfortunately, there is no silver-lining solution for accessibility. Once a client of mine asked for Braille on every sign, thinking that that would be the best way to make the space accessible. Even though those requests come from a good place, we need solid arguments to explain that the best solution may not be what is currently “popular”. The new set of tools help us designers evaluate and make better decisions, for us and our clients.

Heads up that Héctor is giving a talk at Typelab «Reviewing the Literature on Accessibility» on June 25th at 13:30 CEST / 7:30am Eastern / 04:30am Pacific. I may get up early for that one!

Sofie Beier, professor of design at the Royal Danish Academy, researches typographic accessibility. Her talk presented the results of testing what happens with middle-aged readers, since most of the current research involves either young people (always available at academic institutions) or the elderly. She tested optical sizes of Greta Serif Variable with readers of different ages, with the following takeaways:

As I am aging, or better «becoming more experienced», I am shifting away from setting type small just because it looks better. Would my mum enjoy reading what I am designing, or would she call the designer names because it’s hard to read? (She does that. Ciao mamma!) She would have enjoyed the talk.

Fang-ping Lin’s talk was fun and incredibly informative, a condensed class in type design and visual composition. She explained designing Hanzi (Traditional Chinese) thoroughly and with the smartest examples (see above just one example): in case you are interested, she made available the article based on the talk.

On June 4th I woke up to the news of the passing of French-Iranian artist, illustrator, activist Marjane Satrapi. I wish my Persepolis books were here with me in Seattle, instead tthan in a box in Milan, as reading them again would be the perfect tribute. I got to know her through the reports that the Italian weekly magazine Internazionale commissioned her. [If you are in Italy you should buy the June 12th issue: it contains all the illustrations she did for them.] Her books were my introduction to Iranian culture, but they were also so much more than that. She showed a very human and imperfect story, about a dictatorship but also about loss: of a country, of childhood, of a parent, of a language. She fought against any predetermined and monolithic vision on people, women, cultures. I am lost for words.

Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type.

The book celebrates a decade of feminist approaches to type research, design, and creative community-building. It mixes articles from the Alphabettes platform with original essays, exploring intersections between culture, language, business practices, technology, and type. And it's beautifully designed. More women in type please!

If you are in NYC you should attend the book launch organized by TDC, Saturday, June 27  •  7 PM - 9:30 PM. it’s free. RSVP here

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That is all for now. Thank you for your time! Comments are welcome, I am always happy to hear from you.
A presto, talk soon
Marta