Rodrigo Saiani Football kits are some of the most-seen typography on earth. Worn by athletes, printed on millions of shirts, broadcast to billions of screens — the letters and numbers on a jersey carry the weight of national identity, collective pride, and cultural passion. Yet kit typography is rarely treated as serious typographic practice. This workshop changes that.
Football is Type! is a one-day, hands-on workshop where participants design a custom lettering and numeral system for a national football team. Working from the visual culture, history, and personality of their chosen country, participants will develop a typographic system that could live on a jersey — expressive, functional, and unmistakably rooted in a specific identity.
The session moves from analog to digital: participants begin with pencil sketches on paper, exploring how personality and motion translate into letterforms, then move into Adobe Illustrator and a type design tool such as Glyphs to refine and digitize their work. No prior type design experience is needed — the football kit provides an immediate, intuitive brief that makes the fundamentals of typeface design accessible to anyone who has ever cared about a crest, a color, or a number on a back.
Participants will leave with a set of custom-designed glyphs, a practical introduction to the type design process, and a new way of seeing the letterforms that show up on the world’s biggest stage.
Paper, pens, and pencils for sketching; laptop with Adobe Illustrator and Glyphs (or similar) required.
