The TypeLab at Typographics 2025 will host a series of informal workshops, demos, interviews, experiments, and more.
TypeLab is an informal, multi-day, typographic hackathon coordinated by Petr van Blokland to complement to the main Typographics conference and workshops. Like the original TypeLab events in the 1990s, it is a place for people to meet and talk about type and design with an informal structure that allows more spontaneity and interaction than typical mainstage conference events.
All TypeLab events will be open to the public with free registration. This year’s TypeLab will be a split across multiple days and platforms, with a combination of in-person events in New York City and online events around the globe.
* The dates above are based on the time zone for New York City. See the detailed schedule below for dates and times adjusted to your current local time zone.
Schedule specifics are very much subject to change. More details about the schedule and attending TypeLab will be posted in coming weeks. For updates and announcements, join the Typographics mailing list and follow Typographics on Mastodon and Instagram.
TypeLab Schedule
TypeLab events will take place over the course of five separate days.
The TypeLab schedule is always very much subject to change at any time, without notice. Event programming will constantly evolve until the final event has ended, allowing for spontaneous alterations and additions as space and time allow.
El uso de la legibilidad en la tipográfica como un medio de apoyo en el proceso de aprendizaje de la lectura aplicada en los libros de texto impresos.
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En 2010, cuando comenzaba en el diseño de tipografía, me encontré con un libro alemán compuesto con letra gótica de estilo fraktur y decidí basarme en ella para practicar el dibujo digital de letras. El ejercicio fue creciendo cada vez más y acabó en un proyecto que tardó casi 15 años en los que diseñé una familia tipográfica para texto, enfrentándome a la necesidad de cubrir los estándares y necesidades tipográficas contemporáneas en un estilo gráfico que parecería obsoleto. La propuesta de esta presentación coincide con el lanzamiento comercial de la familia, pero es más una presentación entre colegas sobre la experiencia y los retos de diseño que una iniciativa de promoción.
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En esta presentación explicaré cómo se puede usar código para generar textos de prueba, convirtiendo el contenido de los documentos de prueba para diseño tipográfico en un elemento dinámico que se adapta a cada etapa del proceso.
Comenzaré revisando algunas de las herramientas que se pueden usar para obtener palabras según requisitos como la inclusión o combinación de letras específicas, la inclusión de diacríticos o la combinación de varias letras para crear patrones que permitan comprobar la textura o el espaciado. Mencionaré brevemente cómo la inteligencia artificial generativa no proporciona resultados precisos y útiles para este propósito actualmente.
Finalmente, explicaré cómo terminé abordando la generación de mis propios documentos de prueba con Python y herramientas como Drawbot, Wordsiv y diversos scripts que filtran millones de palabras dentro de cuerpos de texto de diversos idiomas. Demostraré cómo usar estas herramientas tanto para la escritura Latina como para la Árabe, y analizaré cómo estas herramientas podrían expandirse en el futuro.
Esta presentación esta basada en otra que di en Inglés en ATypI Copenhagen.
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Red Tipográfica es un colectivo que nace con la visión de tejer comunidades a través de las letras. Nuestra propuesta es construir un espacio donde el diseño, la tipografía y la caligrafía sean vehículos de identidad, resistencia y transformación. Creemos que cada trazo, cada palabra, tiene el poder de conectar nuestras historias, honrar nuestras raíces y proyectar nuevos futuros. Desde América Latina y el Caribe, buscamos amplificar nuestras voces y reivindicar el valor de nuestras culturas mediante la creatividad colectiva.
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Un análisis visual de los identificadores de autos antiguos.
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Mi propuesta de presentación es sobre como fui encontrando mi camino en el mundo de las letritas, descubrir y pulir mi estilo y como nuestras propias creaciones es un reflejo de uno mismo, consciente o inconscientemente. Y justo es un análisis de mi camino actual, donde estoy parada en el ámbito profesional y donde quiero que las letras me lleven en un futuro.
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Desarrollo de fuentes basadas en las teorias de Frank Blokland y Adrian Frutiger. ¿Será que las tipos multiespaciadas son el origen de la tipografia moderna?
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Una colección divertida de propuestas inusuales para dibujar letras y tipografía, pensadas para encender la imaginación y la creatividad, y útiles para romper o superar un bloqueo creativo.
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This presentation introduces a research project focused on the collection, organization, and analysis of type design production in Mexico. Initially developed as two complementary databases—one dedicated to custom typefaces and the other to commercially published fonts (available, discontinued, or free)—these efforts have been unified into a single, consolidated resource. The resulting database forms an exhaustive compendium that documents the formal, functional, and authorial diversity of Mexican type design.
By systematizing data on designers, studios, publication years, typographic families, visual attributes, and communicative purposes, the project offers a detailed and structured approach to understanding how Mexican typography has evolved in response to cultural, technological, and stylistic transformations over the past three decades.
Beyond serving as a historical record, the project aims to generate visualizations, comparative studies, and new lines of inquiry that contribute to the theoretical and practical development of type design in Latin America. It provides researchers, educators, and designers with a tool for deeper insight into the dynamics of type production in Mexico and its role within broader design discourses.
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“El diseño tipográfico ha estado históricamente moldeado por ideales estéticos occidentales, reforzando la hegemonía cultural y marginando las tradiciones visuales no europeas. Esta charla explora cómo diseñadores latinoamericanos están desmantelando estos marcos dominantes al reclamar narrativas culturales a través del diseño tipográfico, la educación y las iniciativas comunitarias. Al integrar lenguas indígenas, iconografía regional y tradiciones visuales históricas, no solo están preservando el patrimonio cultural, sino también demostrando que es posible un enfoque más inclusivo y pluriversal hacia la tipografía.
A través del lente de la teoría decolonial y estudios de caso de diseñadores y colectivos influyentes en América Latina, esta presentación analiza el rol de la tipografía como herramienta de resistencia y autoexpresión. Se destaca cómo estos diseñadores están desafiando el borrado de tradiciones tipográficas locales e indígenas, al mismo tiempo que redefinen la educación tipográfica contemporánea. La charla abordará la intersección entre tipografía e identidad, cuestionando quién define los estándares del diseño y cómo el diseño tipográfico puede ser un vehículo para la resistencia cultural, la narración de historias y el empoderamiento.
Al tender puentes entre métodos tradicionales y contemporáneos de diseño y pedagogía tipográfica, esta charla aboga por un panorama tipográfico que trascienda las normas eurocéntricas. Llama a una aproximación más equitativa y diversa al diseño tipográfico, amplificando voces históricamente marginadas y reconfigurando el futuro de la tipografía a escala global.
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The Mbire Writing System (ChiMbire) is a set of morphosyllabic symbols for Southern African languages. Originally proposed by Rutendo Shannon Goneso, it is developed through her collaborative research with Taurai Mtake and Pule kaJanolitji, as an Africanist intuition for approaching writing. It is aimed at the rejuvenation of the cultural ethos of Southern African linguistic and symbolic traditions, taking ownership of their representation in the endogenous aesthetic and design logic. The script privileges Ubuntu / Botho / Hunhu as a worldview, which sees the Self as just one of many modes of being – a way of seeing that has been argued to be pervasive in the intellectual traditions of Ntu languages (the so-called “”Bantu languages”“).
Initially, a set of 20 symbols, each one to represent a noun class or “”gender”” (modelled on those of the chiShona language), was formulated through visual-intuitive awareness of morphemic semantics, from the perspective of the speaker of the language, as a culturally rooted alternative to the Eurocentric literacies.
These morphograms have since been adapted for use with the isiBheqe featural syllabary for siNtu languages, to create a more comprehensive, efficient, and structurally representative encoding technology of writing, to open new possibilities for rooted representation.
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Maracaibo, capital del primer estado petrolero venezolano, ciudad puerto, entrada a Los Andes suramericanos desde el Caribe. Maracaibo también es una familia tipográfica para una publicación impresa, con rasgos que representan la historia del diseño gráfico editorial en Venezuela y dialoguan con referentes de la región ante la problemática del centralismo. El proyecto busca contar con 3 variantes para párrafos y proponer un diálogo sobre el sincretismo y la identidad.
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Collecting goshuin at sacred sites has become a popular activity for travelers in Japan. Goshuin are beautiful calligraphic “stamps” recorded by Buddhist monks or Shinto priests in a special book called a goshuincho. Most sacred sites offer one or more goshuins specific to their site and scribes often ink the goshuin as the owner of the goshuincho watches.
Goshuins employ a variety of lettering styles. Typically, the monk or priest will inscribe the date and other information with brush and black ink. They also stamp the page with a vermillion seal unique to the shrine or temple. Sometimes other type or images are added to embellish the page. The resulting combinations offer a varied and an inspiring snapshot of Japanese calligraphy.
In this presentation we will compare different lettering styles employed in goshuin collected by the speaker and others. These examples will serve as an introduction into traditional and contemporary Japanese calligraphy.
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The 2025 class of students from the TypeMedia program at KABK in The Hague present their final typeface design projects.
– Kaat Vandenbroeck
– Marion Bisserier
– Lyuboslav Boianov
– Rebeka Orosz
– Gergő Kókai
– Mălin Neamțu
– Céline Jouandet
– Andrea Hayek
– Tina Božan
– Luka Appelberg
– Tamara Segura
– Morgane Vantorre
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“El color es un elemento fundamental en el diseño, ¿por qué no explotar su potencial en fonts? Adéntrate en el futuro de las tipografías variables; gracias a la tecnología COLRv1 ahora es posible incorporar degradados, transparencias y movimiento, redefiniendo las posibilidades de expresión tipográfica.
Compartiré mi experiencia creando Kalnia Glaze, una fuente variable COLRv1 comisionada por Google Fonts. Hablaré sobre los retos, descubrimientos y avances del formato, y por qué necesitamos más tipografías que aprovechen esta tecnología.”
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Aprende los criterios para definir los distintos elementos tipográficos en los créditos de títulos en diseño en movimiento.
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Tipografía Cinematográfica: Letras que Cuentan Historias y Contextos Culturales
Hollywood, la NASA,l a cultura mexicano-estadounidense y las letras blackletter. Todo un compilado cultural.
La tipografía en los títulos de cine no solo introduce la historia, sino que también comunica su trasfondo cultural. Esta ponencia explora cómo las letras pueden reflejar la identidad y el contexto de una historia. Esto contado a traves del proyecto “A Million Miles Away”, una pelicula original de Amazon Studios.
TypeLab Day 2
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Hosted:
On Zoom for TypeLab Europe
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👯 In-person at The Cooper Union
Come settle in. Bring your cold beverage and chill in the AC with us.
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As technology connects the world more closely, cultural exchange becomes increasingly relevant. Language plays an important role in this, yet typography– the visual medium for interpreting language– remains largely Latin-centric. This marginalizes global scripts, which often lack technological support or design innovation. In design education, Latin typography dominates, leaving other scripts underrepresented. This presents a complex challenge, as local and regional script knowledge isn’t something every designer possesses or has experience with.
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When a typeface is seen by more than a billion people each month, it becomes—and demands—much more from its designers and developers. Together with TikTok’s in-house designers and our foundry partners, Type Network improved and expanded TikTok Sans using cutting-edge techniques and data-informed designs. In this short presentation, technology director Guido Ferreyra and creative director Lucas Czarnecki will share the stories behind some of the project’s biggest challenges and how the team overcame them.
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Traveling from my Typemedia project to 2025 with only skeletons!
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This presentation offers an in-depth exploration of typographic practices in the logos and visual identities created in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1992. Through a carefully curated selection of emblematic designs, the talk examines how typography functioned not merely as a visual element but as a strategic tool in articulating the modernist aspirations and socialist values of the period. These typographic solutions reveal a synthesis of international modernist aesthetics and international typographic style with localized cultural narratives.
These visual artifacts underscore the enduring relevance in contemporary discourse, positioning them as significant objects of scholarly interest and cultural heritage worthy of preservation, critical reflection, and renewed appreciation.
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Pour several cups of type designers, lettering artists, typographers, and graphic designers into an email thread. Sauté in hot feminist butter. Add a blog, conference meetups, online hangouts, virtual crits, and a mentorship program. Sprinkle a generous handful of friendship and dialogue. Let simmer for 10 years. Serve in a book form. Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type celebrates a decade of type design, lettering and creative community-building. The book blends key articles from the Alphabettes platform with original essays, articles and interviews, exploring intersections between culture, language, business practices, technology, and type. While the soup is still cooking, the editor, Amy Papaelias, Bikini Books publisher, Nina Paim, and a tasting of the over 80+ contributors (TBD!) will take you into the Alphabettes kitchen to reveal the cover, sample some articles, and savor a few page layouts, all designed by typographic chef, Tereza Bettinardi. Conceived as a potluck type specimen featuring over 100 typefaces by women and gender diverse designers, peek under the lid to see how Alphabettes Soup gets made. And of course, it’s not a party without cake!
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We present the case of a specific feature in our latest typeface that, inspired by analog historical reference, turned into the most defining visual theme of the font. This process involved a multi-disciplinary team to: Understand historical background (presented by Hector Mangas), develop the design concept (Nikola Djurek), and enable the complex feature to work through clever font engineering (Rafal Buchner). This case study is a testament to effective multidisciplinary work, turning an idea inspired by history into a variable font feature for a contemporary typeface.
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Color fonts hold immense promise for expressive and distinctive branding — at least in theory. In this talk, I’ll share what happened when I brought a custom color font into a real client project, hoping to make it a central element of the visual identity. I’ll walk through the creative process, show where color fonts can shine, and reveal the many technical obstacles that emerged along the way — from format limitations to poor platform support. This is a case study about both creative potential and current reality, with takeaways for designers considering color fonts in commercial work today.
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The Omni Latin Tool is an Opensource Robofont Extension developed by Sharp Type and released in January 2025. This plugin is designed to guide type designers through each step of the process of creating a typeface that supports as many Latin-based languages as possible. Léna Le Pommelet and My-Lan Thuong will explain the origins of the Omni Latin character set and demonstrate how the tool was built and how it operates step by step.
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When are digital, automated processes useful and when are analog, physical tools better? How can type designers build gradients and color palettes into COLRv1 variable color fonts, and how can type users access them when setting type? This presentation is an overview of the tools and processes used to design and typeset the typeface Velzyland, from paper and pen to Python and CSS, as well as recent COLRv1 support in browsers and Adobe apps. We will look at what worked and what didn’t work at different stages throughout the design process, sharing workarounds, hacks, and strategies for navigating new font formats and non-traditional letterforms.
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As Fontra is approaching 1.0, it is becoming more and more usable for day-to-day type design work. This presentation will demo the main features and recent updates.
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Tattoo lettering has influenced so many designers! It’s time to understand it a little better! In this class you’ll learn the fundamentals of hand drawn lettering specifically for tattooing! We’ll discuss common mistakes people make when drawing letterforms and what to do to correct them. We’ll also dive into practices and techniques that will elevate your work and help build your own style!
You do NOT need to know how to tattoo to take this workshop.
We will discuss
*Calligraphy and hand lettering examples, references and variations.
*Tattoo lettering references such as Jack Rudy, Dave Gibson
*“Pike” lettering, script, and blackletter influences in tattooing.
*Lettering structure, spacing, and connection
*Flourishing and embellishments
*Drawing lettering to fit within an image (drawn to fit within banners or around an image)
**This will not be a ”how to” tattoo lesson.
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A look into how softness can be a guiding principle in designing new typefaces.
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We’re calling our TypeLab session Remix — a design approach inspired by sampling in music and what happens when you apply that mindset to type. We’ll share three projects where we’ve tried this out, digging into our process, the results, and what we’ve learned along the way. The last one’s still in progress — a self-initiated experiment we’re opening up to the type community. Think of it as part talk, part call-out. Let’s build something together.
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This would be a short presentation of some of the research I did in France on the history of the National Printing House and specifically the brief period when it was run by the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune and served the printing needs of the working-class insurrection.
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The HAL TypePad, a plugin released by HAL Typefaces, is a free tool which offers a more playful, intuitive and accessible way to work with variable fonts in Indesign. The design of its interface is inspired by the engaging layout of digital drum machines or MIDI controllers. The plugin has nine different buttons or operators, which can be applied to five different ranges. It allows for toggling one axis at a time or combining multiple axes.
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When Span redesigned the visual identity and website for the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) College of Architecture, the solution was a whisper from the past. Rooted in the pioneering modernist legacy of Mies van der Rohe and Crown Hall, IIT’s DNA called for something more than just a fresh coat of paint—it demanded a typographic excavation.
In this lecture, Span partner Bud Rodecker explains how the project’s cornerstone—a revived, mid-century modernist typeface—was carefully specified and integrated into the design, breathing new life into letterforms that had long faded from use but never from relevance. Designing from intimate knowledge of the school’s archives, Span’s IIT identity is the first use case of Neue Galerie, a revival of Mies’ little-known “”Allzweck”” type.
More than a case study, this is a call for designers to stay typographically curious—trained to recognize when a typeface is just right, socially fluent enough to connect with its creator, and bold enough to make its first public use a love letter to its historical roots. The identity is humble and deeply intentional. An example of how design can respectfully bridge the past and the future, and how typography is more than form—it’s cultural continuity.
TypeLab Day 3
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Catalan-turned-Australian-turned-Nomadic type designer and lettering artist Maria Montes reflects on the benefits of learning to draw letters and how to apply them in the fields of visual communication, branding, education, and artistic production.
This talk is aimed at graphic design students and mid-career professionals who are interested in learning more about typography but don’t necessarily see themselves becoming full-time type designers.
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In this talk, Ramyatara Mullapudi reflects on her journey into type design through her mother tongue, Telugu—a script full of rhythm, complexity, and cultural memory. Beginning with her own frustrations navigating Latin-centric design tools, she shares the development of Aksharaala Aata—a series of open-ended, analog tools like stencils and weaving frames that invite participants to co-create, play, and rethink what a Telugu letter can be.
Rooted in modularity, defamiliarization, and shared authorship, the project positions the act of letter-making as a living, participatory process. More than just a design intervention, Aksharaala Aata celebrates the importance of building generous tools—tools that create space for spontaneity and intentionality to coexist, and for scripts like Telugu to grow beyond inherited forms.
Through this talk, Ramya opens up questions around authorship, accessibility, and creating generous futures for Indic type design. What might it mean to design tools that invite exploration, rather than dictate outcomes? And how might we make room—culturally, visually, and structurally—for scripts to be reimagined with joy and agency?
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In this session, we’ll demonstrate how designers and developers can use their smartphones to interact with variable font axes in real time—adjusting weight, width, slant, or any custom parameter directly through touch gestures. This method not only simplifies prototyping and testing on the go but also offers a more intuitive way to communicate type behaviour to clients and collaborators.
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Japanese text is composed of multiple scripts: Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Latin. Additionally, foreign words are often retained in their original Latin form. While Japanese fonts include these scripts, graphic designers often combine Latin and Japanese typefaces using Adobe’s “composite fonts” feature or, in web environments, through the font-family property in CSS. However, the lack of fine-tuning features for font composition in CSS can lead to issues, such as Latin words appearing too small or misaligned vertically.
In this presentation, I will explore the reasons behind these mismatches in size and vertical alignment and present solutions from both a typesetting and type design perspective.
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This presentation introduces Hong Kong Type — 19th-century Chinese movable types celebrated for their clarity, scale, and cultural significance. Originally developed by the London Missionary Society and completed by Samuel Dyer and Richard Cole in Malacca and Hong Kong, these types were pivotal in shaping early Chinese-language publishing for missionary and academic purposes.
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Many people are fascinated by Hanzi type design, whether in East Asia or elsewhere in the world. However, due to the vast number of Hanzi characters and the variations in glyph forms across different regions, systematic methodologies for designing this script remain underdeveloped. Even the most advanced and widely used CJK fonts may still have significant shortcomings. Through its “Hanzi Type Design Demystified Project,” 3type has distilled some fundamental principles for Chinese typeface design.
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This session dives into the story of Type Design Asia, a 100% online, part-time course created for creative professionals across the Asia-Pacific. Built around accessibility, mentorship, and cultural relevance, the program responds to a long-standing gap: the need for more avenues to learn type design in Asia.
Through the experiences of its inaugural cohort—spanning five countries—this talk explores the challenges of teaching type across different levels of experience, the unexpected joy of building a pan-Asian creative network, and what it takes to create a rigorous, meaningful learning environment from the ground up.
At its heart, this is a story about community, creativity, and how type design can bring people together—and open new paths for the future of design in the region.
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Naqsh is an ornamental display typeface inspired by the intricate woodcarvings of the heritage houses in the pols of Ahmedabad. Drawing from the rich legacy of Indian craftsmanship, each letterform reflects the elaborate floral motifs, birds, and geometric essence etched into century-old facades.
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People consume type every day, yet most of them are not aware of typography. In the case of Bengali, the sixth most spoken language in the world, this is no exception, even among teachers, writers and publishers. In this context, we have been publishing a little magazine exclusively on typography, named ‘Haraphcarcā’, which means ‘the study of types’, for two years.
The aim is to grow a community and create awareness of basic practices of typography. We have kept ‘Haraphcarcā’ quite slim in volume and quarterly in frequency. The first Bengali types were cut and used for printing in Hooghly in 1778. We also publish this magazine from Hooghly in West Bengal, India, but our editorial team and contributors are from various parts of Bangladesh and India.
Apart from this magazine, we also publish books on letters and design in Bengali. We want to demonstrate and discuss our journey with typography in the forthcoming TypeLab.
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Access to knowledge in typography can become a struggle rather quickly when English is not your native language, even more so when Latin script is not the script that you use most. Words of Type, with its encyclopedia and its initiative at large with online events and its community, aims to make such struggle less complicated, and to nudge the international typography community more international.
Words about Words of Type have started to spread on social media about two years ago. Its encyclopedia has been launched in January 2025. WoT community has been launched in 2024, at the same time as its online events series. And this presentation will be about the project’s story, a live demo of the website, and what are our plans to improve it, with a focus on CJK scripts (and more?).
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In this presentation, I’ll delve into the nuances of Devanagari lettering—from identifying visual similarities to extending it to designing different lettering styles. Along the way, I will take you through different techniques, behind-the-scenes sketches and final works created for letterbox.india (by Ek Type).
Whether someone is new to Devanagari or just curious about where to start, this introductory session can be a starting point for anyone looking to dive into drawing Devanagari letters.
TypeLab Day 4
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Growing up amidst the bustling streets of Kuala Lumpur, I was always drawn to the weathered, multilingual signs clinging to the facades of old colonial shop houses—quiet witnesses to a time when cultures collided and coexisted in Malaya. As modern developments sweep across the city, these typographic relics are rapidly disappearing, taking with them untold stories of migration, ambition, and cultural fusion.
In this presentation, I invite you to rediscover the typography of 1940s Malayan storefronts—not just as visual artifacts, but as vessels of identity shaped by immigrants chasing the “Malayan Dream.” With little formal documentation, these signs offer a rare lens into a multilingual, multicultural design history that predates the nation of Malaysia itself.
Together, we’ll explore how the aspirations of early Chinese, Indian, and Malay business owners shaped a typographic landscape that is as eclectic as it is expressive—and why preserving this design heritage matters now more than ever.
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Pause for a closer look at the type situation in Manila’s premier business district, Makati, and how it reflects the capabilities of local designers and fabricators to create signage that matches the architectural features of buildings from the 1970s to the 2000s. Plus, a sneak peek at the challenges of mounting the typewalk, where the group faced strict security personnel and prying eyes within the private enclaves of Makati’s residential areas.
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This presentation explores the unique vernacular design style found in Pecel Lele banners—visual artifacts commonly seen across Indonesia representing a popular traditional cuisine. These banners, typically made of printed fabric, serve both as signage and as physical shelter in the form of roadside tents used by Pecel Lele street vendors. From a design perspective, they are remarkable for their distinct characteristics: bold typefaces, vibrant colors, hyper-realistic illustrations, and crowded layouts. Despite their apparent lack of a formal system, these visual elements consistently appear, forming an informal yet recognizable ‘template’ that unifies Pecel Lele vendors nationwide. These recurring design choices function as a visual dialect that expresses local identity and cultural context.
In this research, we conducted visual analyses and emic interview with Pecel Lele banner artists to investigate how typography and visual language operate as tangible manifestations of group identity. Building on our findings, we developed a custom typeface inspired by the Pecel Lele style and created a font family that encapsulates its key characteristics. Additionally, we experimented by applying this vernacular style to other design objects, testing its adaptability and communicative power beyond its original context. This project treats vernacular design as a visual language—exploring its boundaries, potential translations, and how local design can inform broader design practices.
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This proposal presents a pedagogical case study on the “Digital Product Detailing” module conducted at the Department of Design, IIT Delhi, where typography was introduced as a central theme under the title Type Detailing. The course formed one half of the broader “Product Detailing” curriculum, the other being focused on physical products. This particular module aimed to familiarize first-year M.Des students with type design—with the fundamental principles of typographic form-making. The presentation will document the journey of students as they explored typographic inspirations, developed an understanding of letterform construction, and ultimately proposed their own Devanagari typefaces. Through this journey, various pedagogical challenges emerged, from bridging the gap between analog sketching and digital refinement to fostering a sensitivity towards typographic nuances in a short instructional timeline. In addition to showcasing student outcomes, this presentation offers a critical reflection on the teaching process itself—highlighting what worked, where instructional strategies fell short, and how the course structure can be improved. The proposal aims to contribute to the discourse around design pedagogy in India, especially in relation to teaching highly specialised domains like typography to beginners. It also raises questions about how foundational courses can be structured to balance conceptual depth with exploratory learning.
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Go behind the scenes with me to learn more about how I keep my online archive of street lettering in India alive and kicking — everything from what goes into preparing for a documentation trip to why I photograph some signs and not others, and how the archive’s annotation system works to what research underscores its organisation. I’ll give a tour of the archive’s brand new website, designed by talented friends at 3 Sided Coin, and tell you all about what to expect in the upcoming India Street Lettering book, brought to you by the inimitable Blaft Publications.
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Kaalakshar is where Kaal—time, darkness, and death—meets Akshar—letters. This experimental typeface blends the gothic edge of Blackletter with the elegance of Devanagari, creating a striking cross-cultural contradiction: ancient yet modern, structured yet expressive.
With sharp, weapon-like terminals and angular precision, Kaalakshar carries a raw, rebellious energy—like a blade. It’s bold but legible, intense but restrained.
This presentation will unpack the design process, visual references, and conceptual foundations behind Kaalakshar, exploring how heritage and defiance coexist in one typographic system.
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This talk traces my path through the world of lettering—from a curious student to a professional letterer, illustrator and graphic designer. I’ll share insights, mistakes, and milestones that shaped my typographic voice, and how lettering became both a craft and a compass in my creative career. Through client work, creative experiments, and lessons learned along the way, I’ll take you through how my lettering style gradually transformed as a visual language in my practice.
This talk blends personal storytelling with practical takeaways for anyone navigating the evolving intersection of design and typography.
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LivingPath is a software allowing you to easily generate alternate fonts based on typographic files that you can import (OTF,TTF). There are a dozen different algorithms, all of which can be parameterized simply by using sliders. All these modifications are applied in real-time to the vectors of a glyph of your choice. They can then be visualized on texts in a langage of your choice as LivingPath can work with any alphabet.
When a font is exported, each glyph is modified and replaced in the original file. The result is an OTF file with the same quality level as the original font (ligatures, kernings, etc.) Rather than drawing new shapes, LivingPath generates alternatives that allow the characters to adapt to new contexts and expand your font family.
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Kotori Judou took a break from school from Q3 2021 to Q3 2022, during this period, he made “Judou Sans”, a multilingual open-source typeface based on Source Han Sans, FiraGO and more. It supports 14 writing systems.
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In this interactive session participants will respond to a series of open-ended prompts to draw letters that defy convention. It’s a space to explore form, push boundaries, and embrace the odd and unexpected in letter-making. No polished outcomes needed—just a willingness to experiment and enjoy the process.
TypeLab Day 5
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Come settle in, bring your cold beverage and chill in the AC with us.
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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 with the materiality of type—shapes, rhythm, and texture. The final outcome is the design of an original alphabet, built from inspiration found in the archive. This is a hands-on session that invites participants to look closely, take apart, and rebuild letterforms in new ways.
The posters presented in the workshop will be drawn from HMCT’s collections, including Polish posters, works by Rick Valicenti (Thirst), Alan Kitching (The New Typography Workshop), Imprint Enlace, Vernon Simpson, Colby Printing Co., and others.
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We Are Speaking / Estamos Hablando, creates spaces for community members to identify shared values, goals, and symbols representing them as a group and create a visual code in the form of a digital font designed “”by”” them. The potential of these tools made out of symbols is to design posters, postcards, and zines that celebrate communities and engage individuals in conversations that advocate for the recognition of their experiences and the improvement of their futures.
Using this guide, high school students from diverse immigration statuses in a school in Queens, New York, created a visual code, from a series of interventions conducted with their teachers in Spring 2025. The intention of this visual code programed into a digital font is to celebrate their experiences as new-comer students; at the same time, they learn different capacities by using it to design different visual outcomes like pins, posters, and zines.
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Each of the world’s roughly 7000 languages represents a unique cultural perspective and enriches our collective understanding of what it means to be human. Yet the vast majority of languages are digitally disadvantaged—the scripts and necessary infrastructure (including typefaces) simply doesn’t exist to allow these languages to be used on keyboards and screens. Come hear us discuss how typeface design plays an important role in the shared journey towards digital equity, and how educational partnerships are creating a collaborative type design ecosystem of language communities, technology developers, Unicode, UNESCO, and academic institutions.
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In this workshop, we’ll explore the expressive potential of text-as-material through collective, combinatory poetry. Our entry point will be a new feature in the p5.js 2.0 release: support for variable fonts. Together, we’ll experiment with how typography, especially the dynamic capabilities of variable fonts, can shape, stretch, and animate language.
Participants will engage in beginner-friendly coding exercises and collaborative writing prompts, culminating in interactive poetic sketches that reflect the plasticity of both code and text. This workshop is open to all levels. No prior coding experience is necessary. Bring your laptop to participate.
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This isn’t a portfolio review. It’s a field report from the intersection of design, culture, and care–where letterforms do more than communicate, they carry memory. They assert identity. They hold space for resistance—and for joy.
In a moment when our communities are contending with unprecedented disruption, designer Nick Adam offers a framework grounded in stewardship and a practice built on intentional care: Care for people. Care for place. Care for the craft itself. Care for futures with room for everyone.
This talk doesn’t promise shortcuts or cheat codes. Instead, it centers design as a civic act—an expressive force capable of celebrating what matters and safeguarding what’s at risk.
Through three recent projects—South Side Sanctuary, Chicago Lowrider Festival, and Help Stop Hate—Adam explores themes of movement and memory, freedom and action, and the evolving role of typography in shaping what we see, feel, and fight for.
Because the real question isn’t “what’s next in our field?” It’s “what do we want to last in our world?”
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We’ll demo how you can create a custom type foundry website using Fontdue in under 20 minutes.
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In this presentation Álvaro Franca of Vasava Studio will present the process, concept and implementation of the new display for for the world’s biggest soccer competition: UEFA Champions League. This mind bending display face uses OpenType, Color Fonts and Variable Fonts to create a believable refraction effect that looks great on screen and reinforces the competition’s new look, where glass takes the center stage.
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Rivers in text are gaps of white space that run through a paragraph of text. They are caused by a coincidental alignment of spaces between words on consecutive lines. Rivers become a distraction to the reader as they become eye catchy and momentarily draw the reader’s attention away from the text. This makes them hard to ignore causing difficulties in reading. In order to solve this, currently designers can only try some manual tweakings like changing line , typographic parameters and doing some minimal content edits for improved results. This is quite tedious process. In order to solve this, we propose a smart technique to automatically first detect and then provide smart suggestions with minimal content edits and typographic parameters modifications which leads to removal of typographic rivers. Also, in case of variable fonts being used ,we are proposing an even improved solution by modifying the variable font width parameter along with the minimal content edits. We use Machine Learning to predict the best changes to be done to the content which are minimal and non-percievable which results in displacement of maximum river nodes. Our proposed solution also allows the user to review the changes done. User can accept or reject any of the changes applied. In case any of the changes are rejected, our solution remembers that and on reapplication of the solution, new changes are suggested instead of the rejected changed. All in all our proposal helps in detection and removal of typographic rivers within the text automatically without much manual intervention.
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You’ve probably heard of Git, and you may have wondered whether and why someone might use it for fonts. You may have even used it a few times, but found parts of it confusing.
Branches? Staged changes? Commits? Pushes? Pulls? Pull Requests? Merge Conflicts?!? Where’s the ‘undo’ button, anyway? Git vs GitHub vs GitLab (etc)?
In this talk, I’ll explain why Git can be so useful for type design and font projects, and I’ll introduce how I use it day-to-day, working on both personal and team projects. I’ll share how it can lend some sanity to an inherently messy challenge (making a new font) — but also how I keep things messy enough to still explore broadly in the early stages of a project. I’ll also attempt to showcase a few “gotchas” of the tool as it relates to type design, and explain how to navigate such challenges.
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Many type designers have left more than one project on the shelf, spent too much time on a project, or have had trouble keeping track of where they are in their projects. This presentation aims to show type designers a straight forward method to think about the production process, and shows how you can use Notion as a tool to organize your production workflow.
The TypeLab schedule is always very much subject to change at any time, without notice. Event programming will constantly evolve until the final event has ended, allowing for spontaneous alterations and additions as space and time allow.
