As you may have heard, the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum has been asked to vacate its current site, and so is seeking for donations to help pay for the move and purchasing a new facility. The museum is located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and houses the world’s largest collection of wood type, estimated to be over 1.5 million pieces. The building that bears its name is the place where the long extinct Hamilton Wood Type company began producing type in 1880 and within 20 years became the largest provider in the United States.

As lovers of type, our team couldn’t pass on the opportunity of contributing to this effort and to help save an important piece of Americana. We discussed a few fundraising ideas and the winning one was… cupcakes in-a-jar! That’s right, we loved Nicole Minoza’s proposal of putting the whole team’s baking skills to the test. The concept was fun, bold, timely (upcoming Valentine’s Day), and would surely entice a broad range of people.

There was a lot of work ahead of us, so we set goals for ourselves and started working on it right away. Nicole was in charge of all the logistics, from acquiring the baking supplies to booking the advertising spots, and I became responsible for designing the promotional materials. We knew our campaign had to be extraordinary in order to grab people’s attention.

To make sure everyone understood the product and the purpose behind it, we decided to have one jar on display in each break room (around 40 in San Jose and San Francisco), with a paper stand that would carry our message. And we couldn’t be happier with how things have gone. When we deployed the campaign last week, people’s reaction was phenomenal. In just a couple of days we reached half of our goal, and we’re on track to sellout today.

Kudos to Caleb Belohlavek and his wife Sandy, for baking and assembling the sample batch of cupcakes. They were so successful that a handful of jars didn’t make it to the end of the week. I truly sympathize with the Adobe colleagues who did such a feat, because I must confess that I couldn’t resist the temptation either. The yummy-looking jar I had was truly tasty!

And a special Thank You to the people outside our team that helped us put this effort together. To Matthew Kelsey for donating the letterpress printing of the stands for the break rooms. To John Sullivan of Logos Graphics for donating the photopolymer plate. To Jamie Saunders of Neenah Paper for donating the paper (CLASSIC CREST® Cover, SAWGRASS 80C, Smooth Finish). And to my wife, Tiffany Wardle, for leveraging her social cloud and connecting our team to these generous individuals.

Stay tuned because next week we’ll have more news and some footage of the team in action. Meanwhile, please consider donating to the Hamilton museum.

Back in December, I did a post to thank all of the people who contributed translations to our Community Translation project. Since then we’ve had a lot of activity translating our typeface notes to Chinese and Japanese (over 100 accepted translations). We are very pleased to see all of this activity and want to publicly thank the following five individuals

Ying Ning

Tonny Xu

Vincent Ding

Hai Liang

Takesato Hayashi

Without them, and all of the other individuals we mentioned in December, this program would not be a success.

To learn more about the Adobe Type Community Translation program, refer to Typblography project page. If you have any questions or requests related to the Type Community Translation program feel free to reach out to us at type-translations@adobe.com.

For a second year, Adobe is proud to be one of the sponsors of the Indian Institute of Technology’s Typography Day, this year at their campus in Guwahati. In connection with this event, Paul D. Hunt of the Adobe type team will be presenting on the process of developing Adobe’s newest non-Latin font offering: Adobe Gurmukhi.

This year, Mr. Hunt will also be hosting a three-day type development workshop directly after the conference in Guwahati from 11–13 March, 2013. The workshop location is currently slated for Guwahati, however if there is not enough interest at this location or if there is more interest for a workshop in Delhi, the location is subject to change. Therefore applications are now being considered for both Guwahati and Delhi and the final workshop location will be decided by popular response. This workshop is targeted at helping to foster local type designers and engineers within Indian subcontinental region and will thus be limited to persons residing in this area.

The workshop is intended to be an in-depth review of the font development process to assist typeface designers in taking their design and font development skills to the next level. Whether you are a novice who wants to turn letter drawings into type, or you have had some experience designing and developing fonts, this workshop will present a range of topics that will help you to improve the technical quality of your font output. During this workshop series Mr. Hunt will demonstrate general type design principles using FontLab Studio 5 and the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO), however these principles will also be applicable to other type design environments.

The workshop size will be kept to 15 participants so that sufficient attention can be given to each attendee. There will be no registration costs associated with the workshops, however applicants will be selected based on relevant prior experience and demonstrated aptitude. Attendees will benefit most if they are able to bring their own laptop. No additional supplies will be provided.

Following is a tentative schedule:

• Mon 11: Introduction to general typeface design concepts
• Tue 12: Advanced font development concepts
• Wed 13: Font production with the Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType

For more details, please contact Mr. Hunt directly: phunt(at)adobe.com.
To apply for the workshop, please do so using the online form.
Accepted applicants will be notified by 15 February 2013.

(Updated 4 Feb 2013 to update information on potential locations)