"Expect the unexpected" might be the mantra for designers, typephiles and artists bound for the 2018 Typographics Festival and Conference at The Cooper Union. Organized by Type@Cooper and The Herb Lubalin Study Center, the 4th edition takes place from June 11 through 21, with an amazing lineup of workshops, tours, demos, interviews and experiments over the 11-day program. Info The highlight of the Festival is the Typographics Conference, on June 15^thand 16^th, with a roster of internationally acclaimed designers in the lineup.

The subjects of this forum are graphic design, publication design, web design, type design, packaging, branding, advertising, motion graphics, and more. And primarily, typography: where it is today and where its future might lie—in the vast terrain of disciplines where typography is a significant part of the landscape. A random sample of the subjects being covered this year offers a sense of the kind of exploration that awaits participants hungry for inspiration and new ideas.

In a field that demands constant innovation and understanding of what the next big thing might be, the Conference and Festival offer an education on such topics as: Type for Indie Film [Teddy Blanks / CHIPS]; Design Beyond Vision [Ellen Lupton [Cooper-Hewit / MICA]; 8 Pixils Are All You Need [Toshi Omagari / Monotype]; W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America [Silas Munro / Polymode]; Typographic Voice and The New York Times Magazine [Gail Bichler]; Ornament is Not a Crime [Parasto Backman / Studio Parasto Backman]; Big Brands Need Big Type [Bobby C. Martin / Original Champions of Design]; Type on the Web: Ooh La La [Irene Pereyra /Anton & Irene]; The Typographic Library: Choosing and Using Type in Modern Times [Jose Scaglione / Type Together]. More

The host city affords its unique brand of information for type designers, scribes and graphic designers, with tours of the spectacular neon signs of Artkraft Straus in Times Square; Constructivist Typography in The Met’s Watson Library; A Walking Tour of Brooklyn Letters; and A Curator’s Tour of the Herb Lubalin Study Center. [Conference attendees get a 10% discount on Tours and Workshops] More

The TypeLab at Typographics 2018 is hosting a series of hands-on workshops, demos, interviews, and experiments from June 14^thto 17^th. This four-day “typographic hackathon” covers a dazzling array of disciplines, from Czech Calligraphy, Lettering and Sign Painting, and 15-minute one-to-one critiques of new designs on June 14^th; Brush and Speedball Lettering, Type Anatomy and Classification Research, and Typography Portfolio Reviews on the 15^th; Kerning, Leading, Glyphs, RoboFont, Variable Fonts and other typographic tools on the 16^th; and Workshop Scripting for Graphic Designers on the 17^th. More

Concurrent with the Conference, on June 15^thand 16th, is the Typographics Book Fair, with a wide array of material relating to typography, lettering, design, and more. Booksellers include Oak Knoll Books, Letterform Archive, David R. Godine, Publisher, Inventory Press, and more, offering everything from rare type specimen books to contemporary titles on typography and graphic design. [At last year’s Book Fair, there was a cast of notable sign writers giving hand lettering demos adjacent to the coffee and donuts bar at the Book Fair.] More

For an hour-by-hour calendar of Workshops & Tours, TypeLab Events, and Conference Speakers, go here. To Register [Academic and Bundle discounts are still available], go here. To view Blog Interviews, here. Countdown for the Lubalin 100 Celebration here. Videos of the 2017 Typographics Conference here.
Photos © copyright and courtesy Typographics 2017/The Cooper Union 4LSphoto