A few days ago, I had the honor to be awarded by SOTA (Society of Typography Aficionados). On the 26th of August, I stood on stage during TypeCon to receive the 2016 Catalyst award and then present my work.

I wanted to write a bit about the certificate I received, because first, it was designed by another Alphabette: Laura Worthington, and second, it’s just gorgeous.

Look at this:

Isn’t it just great ?

Laura did this ALL BY HAND, I am so impressed.

Just a quick line about it: Laura explained to me how she stalked me on social media to find some aspects of my personality. She chose to draw fruits to recall my collection of fruit stickers, patterns for my collection of vintage parisian floor tiles (#passionvieuxcarreaux on my instagram), and of course a dinosaur.

Colors + gold (she used shell gold to paint it. It’s 24 karat gold mixed with a binding agent ✨), and this amazing type, all done by hand. What she didn’t know about me is that I absolutely love when typefaces have their top « regular » and bottom part ornamented as you can see in the « SOTA » word. As I don’t know the proper word for this style, I call them « typefaces with fancy socks ». So I am delighted to have also a sample of this style on my certificate.

Thank you so much Laura, I absolutely love it.

I recently attended the American Typecasting Fellowship conference in the finger lakes region in upstate New York. If you think this is something that mainly attracts men over 70 you are completely right. Nevertheless, the number of women in attendance who are active in type casting more than doubled this year (~3) compared to 2014.

I’m very glad I got to know the awesome Jessie Reich for instance. She recently graduated from Wells College’s great book arts program and now works at the Bixler Letterfoundry in Skaneateles, NY, once a week running the Monotype Super Caster as well as her own letterpress and design practice Punky Press Studio.

Jessie Reich and Richard Kegler, co-organizers of the event

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The Alphabettes are taking a small break from their travels to bring you news from July. We hope to back with monthly updates from this month; wish us luck!

Tribute to Rosemary Sassoon during the 7º Congreso Internacional de Tipografía
At 7º Congreso Internacional de Tipografía held in Valencia (Spain), tribute was paid to Rosemary Sassoon, who is best known for designing the Sassoon series of typefaces specifically for children.

Alphabettes at 6th International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication (ICTVC)
At the 6th International Conference on Typography & Visual Communication (ICTVC), which was held in Thessaloniki (Greece), Liron Lavi Turkenich presented a talk on the subject Latinised Hebrew, Radical anecdotes in search for solutions, and also joined Laura Meseguer, Luisa Baeta, Bianca Berning, Alessia Mazzarella for a panel discussion on Collaborative practices in typeface design.

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July! That means half of 2016 is already over! Gotta catch up with the news (we’ll thank us in a couple of years). So what happened since the last round-up …

February: We published our Love Letter Series

Feb 2: Diana Ovezea released her type series Equitan Sans and Slab with ITF

Feb 16: The exhibition “A+: 100 years of graphic communication by women at Central Saint Martins” opened in London, organized by Ruth Sykes

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Next week, the whole (type) world will look and travel to New York City for the incredible Typographics festival. I thought TypoBerlin this year would be impossible to top regarding number of Alphabettes in attendance and in town. But given that no less than ~21 ’bettes are living in NYC*, plus us global trotters who are visiting from abroad, next week’s event will probably be the record breaking meeting of our little club to date.

The organizers Cara di Edwardo, Alexander Tochilovsky and Roger Black did a really great job at putting together an interesting diverse line up (the first 50/50 female/male speakers event I know of!). Elizabeth, Nina, Marta, Fiona, Victoria, and I are speaking, Tânia is giving a workshop, Sara can be visited on a studio tour, and at the free Type Lab Isabel is doing a demo, and Amy and Bianca are organizing the Alphabettes Variety Show on Saturday afternoon. Stay tuned for details about that. If you are unable to join us at the lab, you may be in luck …

Check our Twitter and Instagram feeds for live reportage and other nonsense. And if you don’t have a ticket yet and are anywhere close to York Neue, this is your chance to see us in person, so register already. Or for the free Type Lab days. (Oops, I see the two events mentioned above are the only women on the Type Lab program. Girls, get out there!)

 
 
* Here is a map of us all I put together back in March for no reason; not totally up to date but giving a rough overview (pins are not showing actual location! No, Lynne is not actually living on the East River.)

It is almost eight weeks to the day since we launched the Mentorship Program. Here is a quick update on how it went so far and where we are heading next.

Number of applications received in the past 8 weeks

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