Ligatures YYZ, made up of the wonderful Chris Rouleau, Kyle Gallant, and Leslie Harrod, contacted me last year with the hope of bringing a Type Camp to Toronto. It didn’t take much convincing as I had always wanted to head out that way and I’m absolutely green with envy regarding their excellent activities and wanted to meet them in person. If I weren’t so scared of cold weather, I’d head out to Toronto regularly in order to participate in their group. (Do you like letters? It doesn’t matter how much you know, just go! Be around your type peeps!) They were correct in estimating that there would be interest for we sold out both days of the calligraphic script workshop with Carol Nix. [UPDATE: They wrote about their experience at Type Camp Toronto here.]
Aside from our supplies getting stuck at the border (what was up with that Canada? I blame UPS!), everything turned out quite well. We had people that had never held a brush pen suddenly discover they were great at it (I’m talking about you, Lorrie!), or experimenting with automatic writing (Yo! Joe!), or even just by changing the pen color (Lily preferred purple!), the life in their letters became amazing.
Our studio was in the incredible Design Exchange building right at the heart of everything at Bay and King. The studio was filled with light and the building was comprised of interesting spaces – a perfect place for designers to renew their creativity.
Our goal was never perfection, but rather trying it all out, and we certainly did that. We worked together, tried new things and had a fun day using those forgotten things we call ‘hands’.
A big thank you to all of our Toronto campers!