Commentary

Audio from the Web Fonts Panel at TypeCon2009

Stephen Coles on July 20, 2009

Yesterday at TypeCon2009 in Atlanta, 11 representatives from the type community packed a stage to discuss the controversial and convoluted issue of licensing fonts for the web. I sat at the AV table and recorded the session for TypeCon. The full two hours of audio is now online. SOTA hopes to follow with video later, but I thought the interest was strong enough to warrant posting something audible as soon as we could.

Panelists

Moderator: Kent Lew type designer, SOTA Board Member
Ted Harrison, FontLab type design software vendor
Bill Davis, Ascender (font vendor)
David DeWitt, Monotype Imaging (font vendor)
Christopher Slye, Adobe type designer
Shu Lai, ShuDesign web designer
Ivo Gabrowitsch, FontFont font vendor
John Hudson, Tiro Typeworks type designer
Bryan Mason, Typekit web font service provider
Garrick Van Buren, Kernest web font service provider
Frank J. Martinez, Esq. copyright attorney

Maybe we should have cut the 30 seconds of relaxed jazz at the beginning, but I find it an amusing counterpoint to the urgency and heat of the discussion. It beats the more obvious “Ride of the Valkyries”.

You can also have a look at Typographica’s Twitter stream which I filled with a play-by-play and a bit of commentary from the event. Anyone got a script that will take a selection of Tweets and post it reverse order for posterity?

6 Responses to “Audio from the Web Fonts Panel at TypeCon2009”

johno says:

07.20.09 at 4:08 pm

Wonderful. You post this just as I reach for the off-button, and prepare to get some sleep.
Joe Clark says:

07.20.09 at 10:05 pm

This will have to be available as an MP3 I can listen to on my iPod. I’m not sitting fixedly in my chair staring at Safari as it slowly gets eaten alive by a Flash app.
Paul Downey says:

07.21.09 at 5:40 am

Thanks for the write-up, and the audio — sounds like a great session on an important topic!

As for publishing your tweets, suggest you try http://listoftweets.com/
Typographica says:

07.21.09 at 10:23 am

Nifty site, Paul. Now I just need a way to reorder all the tweets chronologically.
Robert Fauver says:

07.23.09 at 6:13 am

Awesome, thanks for posting.
Sam Grant says:

08.02.09 at 2:45 pm

Great discussion. I agree with Joe, that this should be a downloadable podcast. My students and I have been talking about this for the last month.