The primary activity of the association is an annual conference, held in a different global city each year.
Each board member is elected by the ATypI membership for a period of three years and may serve up to two consecutive terms.
Previous presidents have been Charles Peignot, John Dreyfus, Tage Bolander, Martin Fehle, Ernst-Erich Marhencke, Mark Batty, Jean François Porchez, Gerry Leonidas, Jose Scaglione, John D. Berry, Carolina Laudon, and Crystian Cruz.
As well as the main conference, ATypI Working Seminars have taken place in Basel (1974), Reading (1976), The Hague (1978), Mainz (1981), Stanford (1983), Hamburg (1985), Gdansk (1988), Budapest (1992), Colombo (2019), Puebla (2019) and Amiens (2020).
Past winners are: Claude Mediavilla (1982), Jovica Veljović (1985), Petr van Blokland (1988), Robert Slimbach (1991), Carol Twombly (1994), Jean François Porchez (1998), Jonathan Hoefler (2002), Christian Schwartz (2007), Alexandra Korolkova (2013), David Jonathan Ross (2018).