This trip started on the tails of a disaster. I’ve already written about the Spokane fires, so I won’t get into those details here. But I will say I almost didn’t take the trip. Once again, my husband was the voice of reason, calm and convinced it would all work out.
And it did.
For those who aren’t familiar, TypeCon is an annual conference presented by the nonprofit Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA), an international organization dedicated to the promotion, study, and support of typography and related arts. Since its inaugural year in 1998, TypeCon has covered everything from type for the screen to Dutch design, Arabic calligraphy, the American Arts and Crafts movement, webfonts, and type in motion.
This was my second year attending. Last year I was deep in my MFA thesis semester, and while I loved every minute, my brain was scattered in about a million directions. The conference still managed to shape my thinking and connect me with people who ended up in my final work.
This year, thesis brain finally cleared, I could actually sink into the talks, even with a smoky head and a Watch Duty app buzzing almost hourly with updates about the very real crisis back home. It wasn’t always easy to focus. But I’m grateful for the space, and for the people.
There were so many incredible presenters this year, and I’m sure others walked away with their own takeaways. But here are the themes that stuck with me most.
* Making without making the thing
One idea kept resurfacing across seemingly unrelated talks. The point isn’t the poster, the print, or the finished font. It’s what you learn by refusing to rush toward it. One presenter runs students through exercises where the entire premise is that they’re not allowed to make anything at all. Cast light through a vinyl cutter. Run type through a scanner sideways. Tape a paintbrush to your head and paint letters with it (yes…really). None of it is precious, and none of it is supposed to be. The goal is simply to get students to stop reaching for the default answer and start paying attention to their own process.
I heard variations on this all week. One instructor makes her students sketch typography at actual size before they’re allowed near a final file, because 11 by 17in still feels enormous to a generation raised on 8.5 by 11in pages. Another built an entire course around designing rules instead of outcomes, where students write instructions for a computer to execute, then sit with the slightly uncomfortable realization that the rules were the real design all along. My favorite moment came from a speaker who shared her own “failed” letterform sketches with her students, attempt after attempt that just wasn’t working. Watching a teacher work through it in real time teaches a student more about process than any polished deck ever could.
* Materials that fight back
Another interesting note was how much of the best work came from materials that simply refused to cooperate. Fruit. Bubbles. Shaving cream. Melted type timed down to the second. A book printed entirely without ink, using thermal paper that shifts color in sunlight and keeps shifting for years after anyone’s stopped touching it. Letters cut from water-soluble paper that dissolved in the wind before anyone could even get a decent photo of them.
One course had students build Hangul letterforms out of fruit, wielding verbs like carving, crushing, tearing, and mashing like tools of the trade. A presenter described one student’s bubble experiment in a way that was both comical and deeply relatable: she has to fight the bubbles just to keep her letterform recognizable, and she keeps losing. That struggle was the whole point of the exercise. Another speaker talked about an ink-floating technique she’s been chasing for over a year. She admitted she simply can’t control it. All she can do is wait for the moment it happens to look like a letter, then catch it. Choosing materials that won’t behave feels almost defiant right now, when every tool we own promises “frictionless perfection.”
* Type as the thing that remembers
A surprising chunk of the week was really about memory and survival, just dressed up as typetalks. One presenter traced an Argentine sign-painting tradition back to its roots among immigrant working-class painters and asked, simply, whether typography can become the visual identity of an entire culture. Another revealed that a calligraphy style long assumed to be regional to Taiwan actually shows up in “Chinatowns” worldwide, all traced back to one largely uncredited calligrapher who supported his family painting street signs. A third walked us through the century-long fight to build a typographic system for a Pacific Northwest trade language, one that could hold its sounds without folding into the Latin alphabet that colonized it in the first place.
Then there was the talk on Soviet lettering, something that is incredibly foreign yet incredibly fascinating to me. The speaker described growing up surrounded by old packaging and shop signs she couldn’t yet read, desperate to learn how to draw those letters herself. For her, typography wasn’t really a discipline. It was the thing that held a childhood and a specific time in history together. A talk on decolonizing type design tied a lot of this together for me, using two metaphors I haven’t stopped noodling on: diversity as a room that looks different but functions exactly the same, and diversity as a revolving door, one that lets your body in and then quietly shows it back out.
* Constraints, not despite but because
Nobody at this conference needs convincing that constraints are generative, but the sheer range of what counted as one this year still surprised me. A single color. A signage code so strict it dictates stroke width down to a specific percentage. A shared, modular type system flexible enough that six completely different teams, working in six completely different materials, could all use it on the same trail installation without the whole thing falling apart visually.
One university branding project locked students into a single institutional purple and forced them to design for three audiences with genuinely competing priorities, all at once. The real value of the exercise, the speaker said, wasn’t the visuals. It was navigating those tensions. But the funniest, and most infuriating (for some, not I), example was the ADA signage talk: an entire discipline squeezed into a five percent stroke-width window, because most people relying on tactile signage are reading it with their fingers, not their eyes, and it turns out almost no typeface on the market actually clears that bar.
* Letters as conversation, not just decoration
By the end of the week I started noticing something in almost every talk, even the ones that had nothing to do with each other on the surface. Type kept getting reframed as something closer to a living conversation, one that happens between a designer and a reader, between a culture and the outside world, between a person and their own history. A branding system built to let six different teams speak in their own voice while still sounding like one project. A typeface that let a student’s grandfather’s handwriting keep talking to his family decades after he passed. A signage code built entirely around what a fingertip can understand when the eye can’t.
Even the icon and ornament talk landed here, tracing a single decorative shape all the way back through centuries of type foundries and hand-carved punches, showing how one small mark can carry a conversation forward long after everyone who first spoke it is gone. Letters, it turns out, were never just sitting still waiting to be read. They’ve been talking to each other, and to us, this whole time. We just don’t always slow down enough to notice.
* And then there was AI
Honestly, I could write an entire separate post on this one. It came up constantly, and rarely in the same way twice. One speaker ran an actual study, pitting human designers against AI in a blind review by experts, and found humans edged out AI on visual interest. The AI simply couldn’t follow the font-pairing constraints it was given, while the humans could, even under a hard time limit.
Another talk pushed back on the idea that AI is even the real crisis, arguing it’s more of a symptom, a design education system that’s been hollowing out ethical judgment for a decade already. And the closing talk left us with a line I keep coming back to: AI has flipped the ratio of what design work even is. It used to be ninety percent the person’s decisions and ten percent the tool. Now it’s closer to the reverse. Their answer wasn’t to reject AI outright. It was that intention is the one thing a machine still can’t fake. That’s where the real design work still has to happen.
* A conference that feels like a room full of friends you haven’t met yet
If you’ve never been to a typography conference, I get it, it sounds like the most intimidating room on earth. A week of people who can identify a typeface from across a parking lot, who have opinions about kerning that could start a small war. Anyone who knows me knows my thoughts on the ego that tends to creep into higher ed and academia, so walking in the first time I expected some of that. What I found instead, and what pulled me back this year, is a room where someone who’s been teaching for twenty-plus years will sit right next to someone who just started undergrad, and treat them as an equal the entire time.
People here share their failures as openly as their successes. They hand out their own printed work for free. They stick around after talks to answer one more question, then another, then tell you to email them anytime. Nobody is precious about their expertise, they just want more people in the room with them. I also got the incredible chance to reconnect with people I’d interviewed for my own research last year, and to spend precious, all-too-rare time with a few members of my VCFA family. We don’t get much time together as it is, and that alone is something to hold onto.
At some point during the weekend, there was a fantastic Freudian slip: someone called it “Type Can” instead of TypeCon, and the room just lit up. Someone joked we should rename the whole conference. But honestly, the slip felt incredibly true. Type can do so much more than any of us think alone, and together, this community proves it, over and over, one generous, unguarded talk at a time.
While this trip started in literal flames, I’m home now in Spokane on a high note, carried by everyone’s kindness, vulnerability, and willingness to share in the name of making things better. 20 out of 10, would recommend, and I already can’t wait for next year!
If we crossed paths at TypeCon and didn’t get the chance to say hi, or if you were there and I missed you entirely, please reach out. I’d love to connect.
Full transparency: I’m a real human person who writes real human words. Claude got roped in to help wrangle paragraphs into some kind of order, the way you’d ask a very patient friend to help you move furniture. But the thinking, the rambling, the too many em dash instincts I had to fight, all of it is mine. This channel is, and always will be, human born, for better or worse.
Sounds like a great time. I really wanted to attend but it wasn't in the cards this year. Hoping that the talks are out on YouTube, they sound fantastic!