Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) Conference Identity Design

I was asked by the Society of Typographic Aficionados to work with a group of my students on the identity design for TypeCon 2012, their annual conference. Over eight months, I directed and collaborated with six of UGA graphic design students— Liz Minch, Blake Helman, Alli Treen, Mary Rabun, Kory Gabriel & Kaitlyn O’Connor— to create an award-winning identity and promotional materials for the 2012 MKE SHIFT conference held in Milwaukee. We were pleased to receive accolades and six of us were able to attend the conference to see our work in context.

A TypeCon event partner was the nearby Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, WI, which is home to the largest collection of wood type, so the students aimed to reflect that spirit of old wood letterforms along with notions of transformation and juxtapositions of old and new found in both Milwaukee’s history as an industrial hub (MKE is also the local airport code) and wood type’s digital revival.

The project was featured on the popular type blog FontFeed and was selected as an Award of Excellence winner in the third annual Communication Arts typography competition, appearing in the publication’s Jan/Feb 2013 issue, the Typography Annual. The project was featured in the book Creative Anarchy as well as featured in the “Type Speaks” column that discussed the relevance of connotative typography in Communication Arts in 2015.

The group in Milwaukee at the statue of the Fonz .

The project profiled in Communication Arts Typography Annual 3 as an Award of Excellence winner

Exhibition of the project process and final deliverables in the C-U-B-E Gallery in the School of Art:

Preliminary Research, Investigations and Exploration