Symposium in Review
The Montréal premiere of Helvetica: Matt Soar, organizer of Logo Cities; Gary Hustwit, director of Helvetica; and, Hélène L’Heureux, Associée principale, Interaction/design, and director, SDGQ. Photo credit: Elida Arrizza.
IT’S NOW FOUR WEEKS since over sixty of us convened in Montréal for two days of intense talk about signage, branding and lettering in public space, and only now have I recovered sufficiently to attempt some kind of reflection.
Here goes:
When I had the idea for the symposium I knew I wanted to keep it small because: a) it would be more manageable (simply choosing to call it a ‘symposium’ rather than a conference certainly helped me); b) it might well be more productive (the best events I’ve attended have been focused around a set of consecutive rather than concurrent panels); and, c) I couldn’t imagine that there were too many people out there with the similar interests.
It turns out that there are lots of people who care passionately about signs, logos and lettering in public space, some of whom took the time to come to Montréal to share their insights. It’s also abundantly clear, in retrospect, that signs are even more remarkable than I had imagined: While they are often reductive in terms of design, routinely brazen in terms of their placement, and rather ephemeral as historical artifacts, the conclusion we all had to draw after two days of panels was that they are also immensely complex cultural and material signifiers (as the selection of papers posted on this website attest).
Several people expressed interest in attending Logo Cities 2. While I don’t have any immediate plans of my own for such an event, I’m open to suggestions as to when and where that might happen. I do have plans to try to secure a publishing contract for a book based on Logo Cities, and will post any news about that initiative on this website.
Over the coming weeks I will also be adding more information and media to the Logo Cities website, including: an expanded bilbilography based on the work presented at the symposium (this was Johanna Drucker’s idea); an interactive documentary about signs in Montréal; a gallery of logos and signs drawn from memory by visitors to the gallery show (thanks to Pata Macedo for those); and, a selection of photos from all the Logo Cities events.
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