Type Brigade

Type Brigade is Vancouver’s type meetup. I became the co-organiser with Cody Jones in 2014, relaunching it as speaker series, focusing on typography, type design, and lettering.

Vince Lo & Alvin Kwan present their initial foray into type design, and how it impacted their subsequent graphic design work.

In our first year alone, we hosted eight free events to bring Vancouver’s type community together. Type Brigade has hosted many incredible speakers, including:

Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, for his first ever type talk in Canada
Alanna Munro, on the process behind Local Lettering
Ross Milne, on his type family Echo for Typotheque
Ivanna McConnell, on typographic identity and Cyrillic writing system
Paul Barnes & Christian Schwartz of Commercial Type, who kicked-off their North American tour at Type Brigade

Photos by various attendees, all shared on Instagram. Photos often feature the custom prints we put together for each event, featuring lettering work by Andrea Husky, Riley Cran, and Cade Cran.

The Type Brigade team and I hope to help Vancouverites’ interest in type flourish with valuable educational events: this includes special events like Bruno Maag’s first Canadian talk, a worksop with calligrapher Martin Jackson, and hosting Commercial Type’s first tour date. We also pride ourselves in giving under-recognised, local voices in type and lettering a platform to present.

Attendees include designers, students, artists, letterers, developers, and other professionals looking to share their interest in typography, or improve their work. We also design a custom print to commemorate each event, which we give away to everyone there.

type brigade commercial type — Commercial Type speaking at Type Brigade on the first date of their North American tour.

type brigade pop up — Our annual collaboration with Peter Cocking, one of Canada’s most celebrated book designers: Type Brigade & The Pop-up Museum of Typography. Peter’s class puts on a large exhibition and I host and introduce lightning talks with all the contributors.

Workshops

During Vancouver Design Week, we also hosted a workshop, where designers had the chance to explore the relationship between letters and the tools used to make them:

Ross Milne leads a lettering workshop, with help from Andrea Husky. The space we were in was on the corner of Cordova & Carrall in Vancouver, so we lettered one street name on each wall.

The Website

I also built the Type Brigade website and blog. Here, we write about the events and what’s happening with the meetup. It’s a static site built using Harp and hosted on the Surge CDN, two other projects I have been part of.

It’s automatically compiled down to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and then deployed, each time someone pushes an update to GitHub. The code is open source. New speakers can also apply there, and we’ll automatically be notified in our internal Slack channel.

A screenshot of the Type Brigade website. — A blog post on typebrigade.com/blog/our-number-twenty, which I designed, built, and open sourced. We are continuing to expand it, as an archive of presentations.

Lettering for Type Brigade

Each edition of Type Brigade, we commission a commemorative numeral. I contributed the “27” and “28” lettering pieces.

typebrigade 27 wip3 — Sketch of the №27 that I continued to work on.

typebrigade 27 prints — The final version of the №27 I drew for the prints we gave away at that event.

type brigade 28 wip 1 — Sketches and concepts for the №28 print.

Workshops

The Website

Lettering for Type Brigade

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