Kenneth Ormandy
Type Brigade is Vancouver’s type meetup. Kenneth Ormandy became the co-organiser with Cody Jones in 2014, relaunching it as speaker series, focusing on typography, type design, and lettering.
In the first year alone, Type Brigade 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.
Kenneth Ormandy and the Type Brigade team 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.
The Pop-up Museum of Typography
Type Brigade’s 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 Kenneth Ormandy hosts and introduces lightning talks with all the contributors.
The Website
Kenneth Ormandy also built the Type Brigade website and blog. Here, they 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 that Kenneth has 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 Type Brigade will automatically be notified in their internal Slack channel.
