The original lettering tours of New York are back for the fourth year. Meet at the TDC and then tour the highlights of lettering in New York.
11:00am – 2:00pm Sunday 13 April 2008
TDC Conference Center
Type Directors Club
127 West 25th Street, 8th floor
New York, NY 10001
Registration is required. Space is limited.
The original lettering tours of New York are back for the fourth year. Each tour is unique and is not repeated. Previous tours have covered the Financial District, Civic Center, Tribeca, Midtown, Morningside Heights, Washington Heights, Inwood, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope. You may have missed out on one of these tours but New York is vast and there is a huge amount of fascinating lettering to be seen in parts of the city that many of us only know about from traffic reports.
This spring the tour will return to Brooklyn with a little bit of Queens thrown in for good measure. The tour will cover the neighborhoods along the East River from Hunters Point (Long Island City) to Greenpoint and Northside (Williamsburg). As the pace of luxo-condoization continues to be as brisk in these neighborhoods as it is in Manhattan now is the time to take this tour. Who knows what lettering treasures will be gone in a few months (or even a few weeks). We just hope they are still around in April.
As usual we will be looking at a wide mix of lettering styles (classical Roman capitals, Art Deco, versals, blackletter, grotesques, scripts), materials (stone, terracotta, metal, wood, plastic) and techniques (carving, casting, painting). The emphasis will continue to be the historical, social and architectural uses of lettering in New York as well as on aesthetics. These tours are an opportunity to see and learn more about the great city of New York.
Paul Shaw has been conducting lettering tours for over a decade. From 1997 to 2000 he was co-leader with Garrett Boge of the Legacy of Letters tours of Rome and Florence. Since 2005 he has been leading tours of New York and other American cities for the Society of Typographic Afficionados, GEL, and the Type Directors Club. Paul has written about lettering in New York for the Society of Scribes, AIGA Voice, Letter Exchange Forum, and the TDC Newsletter. In April 2007 he was profiled by Christopher Gray for his Streetscapes column in the New York Times. He has lectured on the subject to the Typophiles, the Society of Scribes, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library.
If you must cancel for any reason, please notify us via e-mail at director@tdc.org by Friday 11 April 2008. Your registration fee will be refunded less a $50 processing fee. No refunds will be made after this date.
TDC :: Type Directors Club
127 West 25th Street 8th Floor
New York, NY 10001
USA
T: 1-212-633-8943
F: 1-212-633-8944