Second Edition Of Ampersand Web Typography Conference

My one-presentation-a-month streak is almost over. The last one in this series of six is my speaking commitment at Ampersand 2012 in Brighton, UK next week. While I could build on previous work for the presentations of Two Decades of Trajan in Movie Posters at Beyond Tellerrand, BNO Romeo Delta, SXSW Interactive and TYPO SF, this is yet another entirely new talk, just like From Metal Scripts to Digital Writing at TYPO Berlin last month. While last year I merely reported the web type conference, this time I will be on stage, delving into the intricacies of fine typography on the web.

In the organisers’ own words

Ampersand will be a fabulous day of nitty gritty details from experts in font design & development, typesetting & font usage, browser implementations and web design.

I will be sharing the stage with a truly tremendous line-up. The conference starts with The State of Web Typography, the keynote by information/type designer/guru Erik Spiekermann, one of the quickest (in all senses of the word) speakers in the design business. After the coffee break I will try to enlighten the audience with some typography basics with Detail in Web Typography. Then type designers Veronika Burian & José Scaglione (TypeTogether) are going to offer recipes for combining typefaces with Typographic Matchmaking.

During lunch break the audience is treated to a screening of Linotype the Film. This will be followed by a Q&A with film’s director & producer Douglas Wilson in the Type in 20 section. The two other segments in Type in 20 are FontSmith’s Jason Smith explaining the ins and outs of Designing Fonts For Screens, and Laurence Penney initiating the audience in the occult art of CSS font stack hackery. Luc(as) de Groot will crank up the occultism even more with On Hinting.

The two closing speakers are household names in web design. Jake Archibald (one of the most entertaining speakers I’ve seen) will explore the code aspect of web type with In your @font-face. To conclude Elliot Jay Stocks will expand on his excellent TYPO Berlin presentation with Enhancing the Future, showing what bright new possibilities webfonts offer.

And it doesn’t end there – attendees are invited to the After-Party at Above Audio, hosted by Typekit. So if you are even remotely interested in typography and/or web design this is a not-to-be-missed event. To get a taste of what is to come, maybe first read my report of the inaugural conference last year.
Header image: Jason Santa Maria @ Ampersand Conference, Brighton, UK – June 2011
Photo by Sean Johnson

Tags: Ampersand, Clearleft, conference, Elliot Jay Stocks, Erik Spiekermann, Fontdeck, Fontsmith, Jake Archibald, Jason Smith, José Scaglione, Laurence Penney, Linotype: The Film, Luc(as) de Groot, Typekit, TypeTogether, UK, Veronika Burian, webfonts, Webtype