Each year we're lucky enough to partner up with our favourite conferences around the world, and this year our kind friends in Milan at Kerning Conference gave us a full conference pass to give away via Instagram. Our winner this year was wonderful type enthusiast Neva Zidac. Neva shares her Faenza experience with us, along with her favourite nuggets of wisdom from the speakers throughout the day.
It was a sunny, hot summer day in romantic Faenza, 7th of June. I arrived with train from Bologna early in the morning, walked towards the Conference Venue, while peeping into the small, still mostly empty streets. I was warmly welcomed and after registration, directed into the inner courtyard of the conference building. After coffee and breakfast in the yard, everyone was ready to kick off. The first one to speak after the opening by organizers, was Lila Symons with the talk Fonts Made by Women. She shared what it's like to be a female in-house typeface designer at Hallmark and favourite works by her and her female colleagues. She was followed by the amazing Monica Dengo, who shared with us her passion for handwriting and calligraphy, especially the abstract one – as for her the act of writing is a seperate from the act of reading, and often a more important one. After a small break, we were honored by always amazing Laura Meseguer. I enjoyed listening about Qandus and the process of making it, since I'm very interested in Arabic type design lately! Sandro Berra introduced the work of Tipoteca Italiana, a museum of letterpress printing located in Cornuda, as he is a general coordinator. I now added the museum to my visiting wish list!
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After lunch, we were type tasting with Sarah Hyndman! She conducted several small experiments with the audience and intractively introduced her work, exploration of typefaces through different senses. Ulrike Rausch had a very useful talk about all the possibilities and benefits of Open Type features. I was enjoying the conference since the first talk, but cannot lie, I was excitedly waiting for the last two talks by Astrid Stavro and Louise Filli! Astrid showed us different points of her life and career, went through the highlights and finished with her work at Pentagram. Final talk of the day was by Louise Fili, who was as impressive in real life as I imagined. While admiring all her work, I was the most excited while watching photographs of amazing type signs she found around the world, as I share the similar hobby capturing type & signs > @spottingsignszagreb!
The rest of the day I spent searching for charming type in the streets of Faenza, talking with other type lovers at the conference and enjoying myself to the fullest! I am very grateful to TDK and Kerning Conference team for this amazing, one of a kind experience!
