Typography enthusiasts will find a healthy selection of fine design work at The One Club, selected from the Type Directors Club’s two competitions, TDC53 and TDC².

TDC53 is an annual typography competition that selects work from all over the world. Its finalists include both professionals and students from 20 countries, with a majority of international entrants submitting work from Germany and Japan. The finalists’ design pieces are mostly on print, in the form of posters and books. However, the work in TDC53 spans a broad spectrum of aesthetics and concepts.

Visitors to the exhibition will have a chance to thumb through books by Michael Beirut and Vince Frost, among numerous others. There are several Niklaus Troxler posters on view, as well as work by his students. A beautiful interactive piece by Stefan Sagmeister is also on view.

TDC², which stands for “Type Directors Club” and “Type Design Competition” is a more specific competition. It calls for entries that concern only typeface designs. As the finalists’ designs have shown, however, the possibilities in this category appear to be limitless.

Among the winners for this year are Underware’s Fakir, Robert Slimbach’s Arno Pro, and many other notable designs from innovative German type foundries. I caught up with Maxim Zhukov, my old typography professor, about this year’s entries at tonight’s opening. Maxim is a seasoned designer and international typography specialist. He also juries for many TDC² competitions, including this year’s. More and more Western type designers, Maxim explained, are building faces for non-Latin fonts — and vice versa. This increasing frequency of borderless type design is certainly evident at the exhibition, which showcases not only the flexibility of font-development tools but also the type designers themselves.

You can see more information on the competition and this year’s finalists here.

And, don’t forget to drop by the exhibition.

Tuesday 17 July 2007-Friday 17 August 2007

Monday-Thursday, 10:00AM-5:30PM

Friday, 10:00AM-1:00PM

The One Club

21 East 26th Street 5FL

(between Madison and Fifth Ave.)