Learn drawing techniques and understand letter structure from a graffiti writing context to enhance your type and lettering work. This workshop focuses on graffiti pieces and the rich subculture of graffiti writers—a tradition of letterforms that originated on New York City subways in the 1970s. Through drawing exercises, history lessons, and demonstrations, participants will learn… Continue reading Graffiti Concepts for Type People
Launched in 2011, The Typecraft Initiative, develops a range of display typefaces based on the rich crafts and indigenous arts of South Asia and beyond. The aim of the workshop is to look at non-Western sources of inspiration for lettering, typography, and type design beyond Modernism and the Bauhaus. Participants will learn how to decode… Continue reading Typecrafting: Creating Type from South Asian Crafts
Participants will gain practical insight into how typographic conventions differ across languages and learn how to confidently handle different types of typesetting themselves – from single-language texts to complex multilingual publications. Typofix is a tool for detecting and correcting typographic errors in texts in up to 24 languages. It helps unify typographic rules throughout the… Continue reading TypoFix Workshop
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… Continue reading Football is Type! Designing Football Kit Typography
Mexican Blackletter evolved as a unique typographic tradition that blends European influences with local creativity. Spanish explorers introduced blackletter to the Americas during the 16th century through manuscripts and printed materials; by the 20th century, influences such as lettering manuals and cholo graffiti culture hybridised the style, shifting it from formal and ecclesiastical contexts to… Continue reading Post-modern Mexican blackletter hand: the workshop
For Telugu, a South Indian language, spoken by more than 80 million people, native type designers are strikingly few, and script-specific pedagogy remains underdeveloped. Students interested in type design face systemic barriers: Latin-centric software, lack of curriculum, and limited awareness of type’s cultural value. This has created a cycle of low visibility and low interest… Continue reading Type design education for Telugu and beyond
A key feature of constructed scripts—type and lettering designs that diagram themselves—is that one can read off their design spaces and procedures of creation from their appearances. But there are frequently many different ways to ‘play the game’ of these scripts—any given designer’s choices are never definitive, and no algorithms for these scripts are ever… Continue reading Constructed scripts: What are the rules of the game? (And how do we change them?)
Sound symbolism—the non-arbitrary connection between sound and meaning—finds a rich form in Korean ideophones, words that vividly express actions, sensations, and emotions (1). With Hangeul, the Korean writing system, these sounds can be visually shaped, offering designers a unique way to explore how letterforms can reflect rhythm, tone, and movement. This workshop invites participants to… Continue reading Sounds in Motion: Korean Ideophones through Hangeul Typography
My passion for letterforms began in my work as a graphic designer and later as an educator, where I taught students the importance of typography in both layout and communication. When I came to weaving later in life, my background as a sewist and knitter provided a natural foundation for exploring textiles and yarn. As… Continue reading Weaving a Letterform Workshop
This workshop will begin with a presentation of original posters and special books from the HMCT Archive, selected for their expressive use of typography. Participants will closely examine the letterforms, compositions, and typographic gestures in the posters, using tracing, drawing, and other analog methods to extract and reinterpret elements. The focus is on engaging directly… Continue reading From Poster to Alphabet