Hi, I’m Dan Rhatigan. You can use the links above to dig through the design work, old blog posts, and various other things archived on this site. If you like you can also check out some of the material featuring me shown below, or just get in touch.
I was in Hamburg last month at the kind invitation of the Peter Schmidt Group, who asked me to speak at their Beyond Type event. Despite the jet lag, I managed to speak in full sentences about the future of typography as I see it.
I was asked to speak at Adobe MAX once again this year, which gave me another opportunity to try and get people excited about some of the latest developments in font technology, and why I think they’ll prove to be significant. Sadly, of the two versions of this talk I gave at MAX, the less successful session was the one recorded. This one was held in a large hall subdivided into a number of rooms with curtains, and there's a whole lot of audio interference from the other rooms, which made it hard for me to concentrate when speaking, and also screwed up the recording quite a bit. Nevertheless, there are some good nuggets you might enjoy.
Aaaargh!Pink Mince and some of the source material for the “Punk Mince” and “The Stroke” issues is featured in this incredible exhibition about Letraset at the Sheffield Institute of Arts and I want to see it SO MUCH. The exhibition is connected to Letraset: The DIY Typography Revolution, the fantastic book about Letraset and its history that was published this year, which included an interview with me, some photos of Pink Mince, and lots of photos of items form my collection of Letraset sheets, ephemera, and paraphernalia.
The Type Directors Club held a one-day conference called Type Drives Culture, to look at the various ways that typography influences and reflects the world around us. I was asked to discuss my ongoinginvestigation into the typographic landscape of gay porn publishing. In the talk, I refer a few times to Steven Heller's excellent talk that preceded mine, "Raw Typography: Rebel or Rebel", which did a great job of discussing some related themes about underground publishing and the democratization of type.
For a few years now, I've been one of the instructors of the SVA TypeLab, a month-long summer type-design course at the School of Visual Arts. It's always a great experience that keeps me on my toes and forces me to clarify how I think about type so I can properly coach designers learning more about it. Here's a quick promo for the course, taken from a longer interview that's part of a related online course called "The Complete Typographer".
While I was in Montreal last September to see friends and colleagues, talk about gay porn typography, and get a couple of new tattoos, I was asked to have a quick chat:
...after all those typography talks. I had a chat with the fellas from Recon this summer about Pink Mince and fetish and stuff.
“When we visited NYC we met with Recon member spark, the creator of fetish zine, Pink Mince. In this video spark tells us about the creation of the zine, as well as his ethos regarding fetish.”
It may not come as a surprise that a lot of my job at this point is yapping about fonts. This talk took place on November 7, 2017 in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library as part of Type@Cooper West's Letterform Lecture Series. This recording was made possible by a generous sponsorship from Adobe Typekit.
After a trial run of this subject at the Kerning conference this summer, I gave another presentation about the typography of vintage gay magazines, at ATypI in Montreal a couple of weeks ago.
Missing from the clip is my opening joke, which went over well: “The last talk of the day before cocktails seems like a good time to talk about gay porn.”
Fastest upload ever! I just gave this talk earlier today at TYPO Labs in Berlin. I've barely slept for the last two days, so I'm surprised that I sound so lucid.
Since last September’s announcement of the new OpenType 1.8 spec, variable fonts have been moving from concepts and demos into practical solutions. This overview will summarize the progress made so far on new fonts, the environments that can support them, and what some designers have already learned to do with them.
Update: And here's a nice montage of scenes and impressions from the event:
When I started at Adobe last September, the Adobe Type team had been hard at work for quite some time on a major project: Source Han Serif, a serif-style family supporting pan-CJK languages. This is a follow-up to Source Han Serif, but pushes the scope a little further than that project, particularly in that it turns out to have been the original story for Frank Grießhammer’s wonderful Source Serif, as well.
I didn’t do much for the project itself other than keep an eye on its progress while my better-qualified colleagues finished what they'd started, but thy were kind enough to let me talk about the work and how it fits in with Adobe Type’s overall mission, which IS my job to worry about.
