Time and place
The 2008 ATypI conference will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia from 17 to 21 September. TypeTech technical workshops will be held on 17 and 18 September. The main conference will open with an event on the evening of 18 September, with sessions running through Friday, Saturday and Sunday 19, 20, and 21 September.
St. Petersburg was founded by Czar Peter the Great as his ‘window on the West,’ and boasts a famous array of classic architecture, museums, canals, bridges, and vibrant contemporary life. In the Soviet era, when it was known as Leningrad, the city withstood one of the most brutal sieges of modern times, during World War II, and was immortalized in the poems of Anna Akhmatova and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. It is a destination city for European visitors and a modern Russian cultural center.
We are in the process of finalizing the exact venues for the conference now.
Anniversary
This year marks the 300th anniversary of the beginning of Peter the Great’s historic reform of Russian typography (1708–1710). The czar’s top-down reform wrenched the Russian printed word from a form rooted in its medieval origins into a new, Western-looking form that became known as the Civil Type. All the languages that today use the Cyrillic script have been affected by this reform, and the development of Russian printing and typography over the last three centuries is based on it.
The conference logo alludes to the old and new forms of the initial character (‘A’) on the 1710 proof sheet for the Civil Type, marked with Peter's approvals.
Theme
The theme of the 2008 conference is The Old · The New. This topic is perennially relevant to the creative work of the communication designer, and especially important in our times of rapid advancement of communication technologies. The speed of change often takes the public by surprise; it outpaces the evolution of the human mind, of the means of expression, of the conventions of communication; its promise frequently exceeds the actual demand of the user. Among design professionals, this pressure of technology causes – not infrequently – considerable confusion, loss of direction, perspective, and priorities.
Addressing the many issues and challenges of The New, as well as its complex relationship with The Old – at different levels: psychological, intellectual, methodological, practical, &c. – may provide for a better understanding of the direction in which we as a community are moving, and for the creation of a professional agenda adequate to the challenges of the day.
Registration
A call for papers and online registration for the conference will be available shortly.