In its early decades, the TDC was a New York-centric club, mainly
because advertising was New York-centric, especially in the forties and
fifties. By 1958, the sights were set further, holding an all-day World
Seminar, with a 200-piece show and participants like Max Huber and
Herbert Spencer. Another watershed event, notes Haley, was the TDC’s
international conference Type 1987, held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in
Manhattan and organized by Roger Black. In addition to bringing in noted
type “stars” from outside the us like Adrian Frutiger and Neville
Brody, Type 1987 was an opportunity to mingle with people involved with
typography and design from around the world. At the October 2011 opening
of the annual exhibit, current club president Diego Vainesman spoke
about attending Type 1987 at the invitation of his teacher at Parsons,
Martin Solomon. He found himself surrounded by his idols. “To me the
most incredible thing of the event was when I started looking at these
people, Benguiat, Frutiger, Zapf and realized that there was a face
behind the typeface. The Type Directors Club was giving me that chance,
the chance to
meet the ‘face behind the typeface.’”
This flyer was for the first-ever event held by the Type Directors Club, a series of typographic lectures in 1947. A New York Times
article written at the time of Type 1987 notes the participants sharing “trade secrets” and regaling “the pleasures of a well-wrought ‘w,’ or a
curvaceous ‘q’” all while worrying over the new digital frontier. “Digital technology, it was generally agreed, was both the main hope and
the main danger for future typeface design.” In the late 1980s and the
advent of desktop publishing, the typesetting world turned upside down.
Once digitally set type reached sufficient quality, type houses died.
The “type director” job may have become defunct, but the Type Directors
Club kept the name. The new “type director” became each individual
designer or art director or type creator.
The path to membership
opened up—no more sponsors and required portfolios. As former club
director John D. Berry wrote on his “dot-font” column at creativepro.com
in 2000, “TDC may once have been a ‘club,’ but it has long since
outgrown that cozy scale. Its membership is open to anyone practicing
typography in any form...its large conferences have attracted attendees
from around the country and its presence is felt around the world.”
Today,TDC exhibitions travel far and wide. In September 2011, Wahler
escorted the annual show to the ATypI conference in Reykjavík, just one
of the seven traveling shows mounted each year.
This is a set of work that included the first call for entries for the Type Directors Club show, a lecture series and a gallery showing. Designed by the legendary Herb Lubalin, it was his novel interpretation of a California job case as a repetitive illustration. By opening up
membership in the 1980s to anyone with a love of type and by focusing
even more on education (holding classes, student competitions, awarding
scholarships) and keeping an eye on the new in type and typography, the
TDC thrived rather than died. No longer an old boys club, today’s TDC is
younger, more international and more diverse. Although the club may
have started out as an advertising trade organization, it has grown in
scope and membership to be a typography and design professional
organization. Clifford, who once held the title of type director at
Chiat\Day, originally joined because of the reduced members’ fees for
competition entries. But he soon found himself among kindred spirits. “When I first arrived in New York City from the United Kingdom in the
early nineties, I knew very few people in the industry in the city. All
of my contacts had been built up working in London. Walking into the TDC
and being surrounded with a bunch of like-minded individuals with a
burning passion for typography was incredibly comforting—even if they
did speak with funny accents. Instantly I had a network of designers,
typesetters and suppliers who could help with anything I needed to get
done in the city.”
Former club president and board chair (and
multilingual type designer) Gary Munch agrees. “One aspect that
attracted me to the TDC is that it is a place where type designers can
come to meet each other with some frequency and talk about what we
otherwise would be e-mailing back and forth. It’s helped me immensely to
get better at type design, in non-Latin and Latin.” Haley reflects that
he’s made a lot of good friends because of the TDC. Wahler adds, “Today
so many people work for themselves, they need to get out and be around
other designers. They come to the club and they feel like it’s family.” CA