The third annual TYPO Labs conference will be held April 12-14 in Berlin. Under the theme of 'How far can we go?,' the conference will bring together 300 international developers to discuss new technologies for rendering text across the digital spectrum, including online, on mobile screens, and in virtual spaces.
For the first time at TYPO Labs 2018, font makers will meet font technologists. The organizer of the event, Monotype, invited the CSS Working Group to hold its annual meeting two days before the Labs in the same location. The CSS WG was established by the World Wide Web Consortium in 1997, and it defines the standards for website design, including the behaviour of fonts. Among the 125 members are representatives from Adobe, Apple, Bloomberg, Google, HP, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Mozilla, Pearson, Samsung, and Tencent.
"We are especially proud that the CSS Working Group will be here. It's as if the manufacturers of musical instruments convened with musicians, conductors, and composers ... the perfect panel to talk directly about new concepts, improve upon them, and implement them quickly," commented conference director Jürgen Siebert about the upcoming symposium for digital written communications, adding that it took years before web fonts could be used by browsers and developers. The variable fonts are already running in browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla, and "at that speed, the newest blessings of the type world should quickly become reality."
In his presentation, Canadian font developer John Hudson will talk about how perfect the timing is for the new font format. He is a member of the Unicode Consortium, which develops and monitors new characters and emojis; he will use three examples to demonstrate how variable fonts can enrich digital communication. Luc(as) de Groot, creator of the ARD type, Thesis, and the Microsoft system fonts Calibri and Consolas, is an expert in font interpolation, the relationship of weighting in font families. He will present his latest theories for the first time publicly. In addition, London engineer Bianca Berning will explore the repercussions of the newest font technologies on the design of the written word.
more: typotalks.com