Typ09: the heart of the letter
Mexico City, 26–30 October 2009
The written word, the repository of memory for all the earth’s people, has a rich history in the New World. Meso-America is one of the few places, with Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt, where writing was independently developed. The famous Maya script is only one of five or six scripts that have been documented from this area.
In 1539, less than 50 years after the Spanish conquest and only a century after the invention of moveable type in Europe, New Spain boasted the New World’s first printing press. Although the presses were brought over to publish governmental and religious documents, the criolla culture of Mexico – the essential mixture, mestizo, of colonial and indigenous culture – found its own uses for printing and created a strong, particular demand for type. Letterforms were the heart of the cultural ferment – as they are today.
In Mexico City today there is a convergence of history and modernity, the past meeting the present and future, that gives the city a special, uniquely Mexican aura. Around a zócalo that covers nearly half a square kilometer, Aztec ruins co-exist with a sixteenth-century cathedral and colonial government offices that are still in use.
Here, at the birthplace of printing in the Americas, the 2009 ATypI conference, Typ09, will be held. The last week of October, just before the celebration of El Día de los Muertos, typographers, designers, educators, and typographic professionals from around the world will converge on Mexico City to celebrate the importance of type as the means of human communication, and to explore its history and its future.
The School of Design of Anáhuac University is proud to host Typ09, and to offer the historic center of Mexico City as a backdrop for a gathering of typographers, graphic and editorial designers, multimedia professionals, editors, printers, writers, linguists, philosophers, philologists, and historians to reflect on the place and influence of the written word in the world today
Programa preliminar de Typ09, la 53a conferencia anual de ATypI a desarrollarse en la ciudad de México el próximo mes de octubre.
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