I am in the midst of a lot of public speaking right now. The last few days it’s been at the ATypI conference in St Petersburg, Russia (where, to my considerable surprise, I was one of a number of recipients of a medal from the Russian government last night – it’s a strange world, friends).

Monday night (tomorrow) at the InDesign User Group in London, England, I’ll be doing an updated version of my favorite talk: Typography for Humans. “Traditonal typography was restricted by mechanical limitations. However, the digital technology of OpenType has spawned fonts which celebrate the human hand and the human mind, from random elements that mimic handwriting and calligraphy, to fonts that translate themselves, censor themselves, or predict the future. Along the way, fine typography is largely automated. But it is still easy to create typography which, in favoring aesthetics or tradition over legibility, fails to achieve its basic purpose of communication. Thomas Phinney explores and demonstrates these human and anti-human developments on the frontiers of digital typography, with typefaces created by himself, his Adobe colleagues, and others around the world.”

Admission is free, and if it’s like other IDUG meetings I’ve been to, so is the pizza. 🙂

October 18th, at the AIGA “Social Studies” conference (graphic design education conference) in Baltimore, I’ll be doing a short talk on legibility in typography.

October 23rd, I’ll be giving the same talk as the London one above, at my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada.

October 27th I’ll be speaking at the University of Lethbridge (Canada).

As part of this late October road trip, I may also line up something in Calgary and possibly Vancouver as well… TBD. Let me know if you have any suggestions of people I should work with to arrange such a talk. 🙂