PORTLAND, Oregon — The typographic community has descended upon the Pacific Northwest for a milestone celebration. TypeCon, the premier annual international conference dedicated entirely to typography, type design, and the broader visual arts, is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Set against the vibrant, creative backdrop of Portland, Oregon, this year’s gathering has drawn hundreds of designers, typographers, educators, and industry leaders from around the globe.
Among the key corporate participants joining in the milestone festivities is the Adobe Typekit team. Known for powering web fonts and bridging the gap between desktop design and browser-based implementation, the Typekit division has rolled out an extensive lineup of exhibitions, live demonstrations, and expert presentations for the week-long event.
From rare historical artifacts salvaged from mid-century print shops to cutting-edge software previews and deep dives into the cultural evolution of digital iconography, Adobe’s presence at TypeCon 2017 underscores the evolving relationship between traditional print craftsmanship and modern digital workflows.
Main Facts: The Intersection of Heritage and Innovation
At its core, TypeCon serves as a melting pot where the ancient art of letterpress meets the hyper-modern demands of responsive web design and variable fonts. This year, the Adobe Typekit team has anchored its conference presence in two distinct pillars: a profound respect for typographic heritage and a forward-looking glimpse into future software capabilities.
The headline feature of Adobe’s cultural footprint at TypeCon is its ongoing partnership with the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. Through this collaboration, attendees have been treated to a museum-grade display of rare, mid-century commercial posters.
Simultaneously, Adobe is utilizing the conference as a testing ground for community engagement and technical transparency. By deploying prominent team members like Steve Ross, Wayne Hoang, and Paul Hunt to lead sessions, Adobe is directly connecting with the typography grassroots—gathering feedback, showcasing unreleased toolsets, and sparking conversations about how human language and culture influence the tools designers use every day.
Chronology of Events: A Week with Adobe at TypeCon
For attendees looking to navigate the packed conference schedule, the Adobe Typekit team has maintained a continuous, highly visible presence throughout the venue, punctuated by several key scheduled events.
Throughout the Conference: The Hamilton Wood Type Exhibit
Running continuously across the duration of TypeCon, the exhibition curated in partnership with the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum has drawn massive crowds. The display features 10 to 12 rare vintage posters originating from the collection of the Enquirer Printing Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, which Hamilton acquired in 2016.
These artifacts—primarily circus and entertainment advertisements dating from the 1930s through the 1950s—showcase the bold, idiosyncratic aesthetics of hand-carved wood blocks. Adding a tactile, interactive dimension to the display, representatives from the Hamilton museum brought original historical wood blocks to the conference floor. During breaks, attendees have had the rare opportunity to watch these blocks being inked and printed live, walking away with authentic, handcrafted letterpress souvenirs.
Friday, August 3: Software Sneak Peeks and Interactive Challenges
As the conference reached its halfway point on Friday, the focus shifted sharply toward technical innovation and community fun.
- The Type Tool Sneak Peek (Midday): During the lunch hour, Adobe’s Steve Ross took the stage alongside Wayne Hoang from the Adobe Illustrator and InDesign engineering team. The duo delivered an exclusive, highly anticipated preview of upcoming type tool features currently in development for Adobe’s flagship design suites. While details remain under tight embargo, the presentation offered a glimpse into how future software updates will streamline font management, glyph manipulation, and layout integration for digital designers.
- The SOTA Spacebar (Friday Evening): Friday night marked the triumphant return of the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) Spacebar event. Proudly supported by Adobe, the event lived up to its reputation as "a game, wrapped in a conversation, finished with a selfie." Conference-goers formed teams to tackle typography-themed challenges, socialized over refreshments, and competed for exclusive prizes.
Saturday, August 4: Exploring Language, Culture, and Emoji
The final full day of the conference kicked off at 9:30 a.m. with one of the most culturally relevant keynotes of the weekend. Paul Hunt, a prominent designer at Adobe, delivered a widely attended presentation titled "Language, Culture, Emoji."
Drawing on his extensive background in multi-script type design, Hunt explored how pictorial communication systems have integrated into formal typography, examining the sociological implications of emojis, their design constraints, and how modern type systems handle non-traditional characters across global platforms. Following Hunt’s morning address, members of the Adobe Typekit team fanned out across the venue to attend remaining sessions, participate in panel discussions, and engage in informal networking with the global design community.
Supporting Data: Preserving the Past, Building the Future
To fully appreciate the scope of Adobe’s involvement at TypeCon 2017, it is necessary to examine the artifacts and historical contexts driving their exhibitions and presentations.
The Enquirer Printing Company Collection
The vintage posters on display in Portland are not merely decorative; they represent a vanishing era of American commercial printing. The Enquirer Printing Company, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, was once a powerhouse in the production of large-scale theatrical, circus, and carnival advertising.
- Date Range: 1930s – 1950s.
- Medium: Hand-carved wood blocks combined with large-format metal type and multi-pass lithography.
- Acquisition: Rescued and integrated into the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum archive in 2016 to prevent the scattering or destruction of these unique cultural artifacts.
The physical presence of these posters at TypeCon serves as a reminder to digital-first designers of the physical constraints—such as grain, ink bleed, and block warping—that shaped the foundational rules of western typography.
The Evolution of Digital Type Tools
The collaboration between Adobe’s Typekit, Illustrator, and InDesign teams reflects a broader data trend within the software industry: the demand for seamless cloud-to-desktop typography integration. With thousands of web fonts available through subscription libraries, designers increasingly face the challenge of managing font licensing, activation fatigue, and cross-platform rendering discrepancies.
The sneak peeks delivered by Steve Ross and Wayne Hoang address these bottlenecks, utilizing user telemetry and community feedback gathered at past conferences to engineer smarter, context-aware type menus and faster activation protocols within Creative Cloud applications.
Official Responses and Industry Perspectives
The partnership between commercial software giants like Adobe and preservationist institutions like the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum signals a maturing relationship within the design sector—one where technological advancement actively seeks to honor physical craftsmanship.
Representatives from the Hamilton museum noted that bringing original blocks to TypeCon allows younger generations of digital designers to touch the physical weight of wood type, fostering a deeper appreciation for the proportions and kerning traditions that algorithms attempt to replicate today.
Meanwhile, Adobe spokespersons emphasized that TypeCon remains an irreplaceable venue for direct dialogue. Unlike corporate user conferences, TypeCon attracts typographic purists, academic researchers, and independent foundries. For Typekit, participating in events like the SOTA Spacebar and sponsoring keynote presentations allows the company to listen directly to the pain points of working type designers.
Paul Hunt’s lecture on emojis further highlighted Adobe’s commitment to expanding the definition of typography. In official statements surrounding his presentation, Hunt stressed that modern typography is no longer restricted to the Latin alphabet or even traditional alphabetic scripts. As global communication increasingly relies on ideograms and cross-cultural symbols, type foundries and software developers must treat emojis with the same rigorous kerning, scaling, and stylistic consistency traditionally reserved for classic serif and sans-serif typefaces.
Implications: What TypeCon 2017 Means for the Future of Typography
As TypeCon concludes its 20-year anniversary celebration in Portland, the ripples of the event are expected to influence the design industry for years to come.
Bridging Analog Craft and Digital Efficiency
The juxtaposition of 1930s circus posters with bleeding-edge software previews points to a healthy, introspective design ecosystem. As automation and artificial intelligence begin to infiltrate graphic design software, type designers are increasingly looking backward to understand the human quirks that make typography compelling. By supporting the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, Adobe is positioning itself not just as a software vendor, but as a custodian of visual culture. The tactile experience of hand-printed wood blocks reminds digital practitioners that letterforms carry historical weight, texture, and cultural narrative.
The Expansion of the Typographic Canvas
Paul Hunt’s exploration of emojis and digital language signals a permanent shift in how software must handle text. As messaging platforms dominate global communication, typography is evolving from a static page-layout discipline into a dynamic, cross-platform, multi-modal medium. The upcoming tools teased by Adobe’s engineering teams will likely need to accommodate these complex linguistic requirements, providing creators with robust controls over non-traditional characters, variable font axes, and responsive scaling.
Community-Centric Software Development
Ultimately, Adobe’s heavy investment in TypeCon 2017 highlights the value of community-driven product development. By embedding team members in grassroots events, sponsoring interactive community spaces like the SOTA Spacebar, and participating in open technical discussions, Adobe ensures that its tools are shaped by the actual needs of typographers rather than corporate assumptions alone.
As TypeCon looks ahead to its next decade, the partnership between historic preservation and digital innovation will undoubtedly remain a driving force, ensuring that whether a designer is carving wood in a 1940s print shop or coding web fonts in a modern studio, the core principles of legibility, beauty, and human expression remain paramount.
