2012 TypeCon Type Crit: Photo Evidence!

Photos: 2012 TypeCon Type Crit. Akira Kobayashi reviewing the test print.
Intense stares from John Downer and Roger Black (just looking at this photo brings about a wave of anxiety).
©May Chung

 

Several weeks ago, at the ATypI conference in Montreal, I met a delightful woman named May Chung; May is design professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I don’t recall how we happened upon the topic, but we ended up talking about the 2012 TypeCon conference in Milwaukee. I mentioned I had participated in the Type Crit that year. May’s eyes lit up. She said she watched those critiques, though she didn’t remember the specifics of my critique (…why would she?!). May was holding a big SLR camera in her hand, and I asked her if she had, by chance, taken any photos during the 2012 Type Crit. Yes, she told me, she was certain she had photos from the 2012 Type Crit—though she made no promises whether she had taken any photos of me or during my critique.

This afternoon I received an email from May with several photos attached. I let out a scream when I saw I was indeed in a couple of May’s photos!

Why does the photo matter? Well, it does—and it doesn’t.

The 2012 TypeCon was my first typography conference, and I only knew a handful of people in the type world. I didn’t feel comfortable asking a stranger to snap photos for posterity, and while I knew plenty of people in the room had taken photos, I didn’t know who any of those people were. While I worked on the book, I asked around and scoured Flikr archives with the hope of finding photos from the critique, but I never found any. I didn’t expect the photos would provide new insight on the critique itself, but would have been a whole lot of fun to include one of the photos in the book.

A huge thank you to May Chung!