No official dates for Mexico City, but Roger Black & co. plan for it to back into the "Day of the Dead" celebrations, so that would place it at the end of October.

Cheers, Si

Though there haven't been frequent posts to the main content on Typographica, I try to keep the Happening sidebar up to date.

For those who prefer to be in the sun & drinking beer during February, there is TypeSHED11 from 11–15 Feb in Wellington, NZ. Check out the lineup of speakers—it'll be a great event.

--K

Another thought, more serious this time:

Organizers of events may want to think about advance polling of people to see how many think they may be able to attend. As budgets shrink, fewer folks may be able to travel.

Organizers of a conference I attend every year have called it off entirely because so few university press production and design staff members have sufficient loot in their budgets to attend this year. Anticipated low attendance meant not enough money coming in as fees; the organizing press felt it was impossible to stage the conference. University presses are cutting back on travel budgets these days. I do not expect that our annual general meeting will be cancelled, but I expect attendance will be down.

Institutional, corporate, and individual travel budgets are among the first to feel the knife when money is tight. I hope to go to Mexico City; ten months out I am not at all sure I'll be able to afford it. I hope enough others feel differently, and I hope the organizers can put on a vibrant event.

powers

Such a poll would not be that hard to do, at the start. It would, I admit, be far from definitive. E-mail address lists exist for organization members and for people who have attended conferences in the past. Sending out an e-mail to the list, asking a few questions about attendance would be done easily. Toting up replies and making sense of them will be more work, though. On top of the already tough task of setting up a conference.

The group I referred to that cancelled its meeting is a fairly tight-knit group of around a hundred folks, I'd guess. So that's easier. It took one e-mail from the organizer, a batch of responses, and in a couple of weeks the decision was made.

Best of luck for TypeCon, TypoBerlin, and ATypI. Best of luck for everything in 2009. We need it.

powers

One additional note, the typography conferences help in far-flung exotic locations seem to attract a good number of locals, as well as the usual suspects (more often than not the speakers). If the goal of the organizers is typographic education/evangelism then they don't need all of us to attend - but it does make for more fun and better parties.

Another note - these events could not be run without corporate sponsorship, subsidized/free local venues, volunteers and in some cases government funding. So the best thing anyone with any influence could do to support them is get their sponsorship $'s and tangible offers of help in early.

> We are currently working on a calendar for Typophile

Yay! I can drop that from the new Typographica then.

Yeah, we know the site needs updating. Our amazing web volunteer (Brian Crick) was all set to work on it, then Life happened and he got otherwise occupied. The plan was to return the site to a neutral design temporarily. But now the 2009 Atlanta identity is underway (by Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio), and timing might be such that it makes sense to wait until the identity is done and do the whole update at once. Tamye's still working on speakers, etc. It's still a little early.

But stay tuned . . .

-- K.

Eighth annual Friends of St Bride Library Conference
St Bride Library, London, 23 and 24 April 2009

Theme: Revival!

http://stbride.org/events/revival

"But, do they kill them humanely?"

Not before Molésting them :-)

ChrisL

LOL!!!
or at least Martha's Vineyard.

ChrisL

"They usually escape by “burr(l)ow”ing..."

Fortunately, my property is protected by a very sophisticated satellite-guided mini-rocket-firing whack-a-molé game I can play from FL's actions window, which, as you probably know, is way too dangerous to use on fonts.

Cheers!