Workshops

The Typographics festival includes a variety of workshops and local tours between June 23 and July 3, covering every­thing from hand lettering to creative coding.

Those with in-person tickets to the main Typographics conference are eligible for a 10% discount on the workshops and tours below. Email type@cooper.edu before registering for a workshop for a special promo code. No partial refunds will be given.

Registration for Typographics workshops and tours is separate from the main Typographics conference, TypeLab, or Book Fair. You must register for these events separately.

Workshops and tours take place in person in NYC unless noted otherwise. Schedules are listed in NYC time (EDT/UTC-4).

Please note: Typographics participants are subject to our Code of Conduct & Policies. If you do not agree to these conditions, do not register or attend any Typographics events.

Graffiti Concepts for Type People with Kel Troughton

Graffiti Concepts for Type People
with Kel Troughton

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 how to adapt ideas from the graffiti world while respecting the artform and its practitioners. You’ll work on a series of drawings, developing one idea into a lettering piece, drawn alphabet, or foundation for a new display typeface. Kel will help you see the graffiti around you in new ways and leave the workshop with fresh ideas and a deeper appreciation for graffiti work. No prior experience with graffiti writing is necessary—just a type or lettering practice and curiosity for other forms of letter making. No computers are required for this workshop.

Mon–Tue, June 23–24, 2025
10am–5pm
$535
Details and registration

3D Typography in Blender with Rob Stenson

3D Typography in Blender
with Rob Stenson

Have you ever wanted to build a tower made of letters? Wouldn’t it be fun to knock it over and watch all the glyphs crash into each other? Or what about an entire paragraph of text that can float like helium balloons? And what if you took a really nice shallow depth-of-field photograph of those balloons as they flew away into an orange sunset?

This two-day workshop will focus on building and animating typography in three dimensions using the open-source program Blender and ST2, an extension that brings high-quality—and cutting-edge—typography to Blender.

If time allows, we’ll also unlock procedural workflows in Blender, using both their Geometry Nodes visual programming language and Python for text-based scripting.

By the end of the class, you’ll have your very own photorealistic 3D typography animation.

Wed–Thu, June 25–26, 2025
10am–5pm
$535
Details and registration

Inspired from Within with Selman Creative, St. John the Divine Marketing Team

Inspired from Within
with Selman Creative, St. John the Divine Marketing Team

-A conversation with Selman Creative Director Anne Di Lillo, Senior Designer Courtney Ewan, and St. John the Divine’s marketing team, Kristine Pottinger & August Kissel on the influence of the Cathedral’s historical type within the new identity system of St. John the Divine.

-Participants will create their own charcoal rubbings from inlaid bronze lettering and historic inscriptions. Charcoal and paper provided by Selman.

-This workshop includes a vertical tour of the Cathedral. On this adventurous tour, climb more than 124 feel through spiral staircases to study the grand architecture of the Cathedral from several unique vantage points and otherwise inaccessible spaces. This tour is not ADA accessible.

Wed, June 25, 2025
2–4pm
Free
Details and registration

Intro to Letterforms with Pointed Pen with Aspacía Kusulas

Intro to Letterforms with Pointed Pen
with Aspacía Kusulas

Discover the rhythm and structure of calligraphy while learning to see letterforms in a new way. This workshop introduces the fundamentals of pointed pen calligraphy through the lens of historical Copperplate script—a formal yet fluid style that encourages precision, rhythm, and creative exploration.

Thu, June 26, 2025
10am–3pm
$220
Details and registration

Producing the Best Cyrillic with Ilya Ruderman

Producing the Best Cyrillic
with Ilya Ruderman

In this 3-day workshop, Ilya will guide you through the history and contemporary use of Cyrillic type, exploring different Cyrillic-based languages and their unique typographic needs. In the first part, you’ll gain a solid understanding of Cyrillic’s historical background and design principles. In the second part, you’ll apply this knowledge by extending an existing Latin font with your first Cyrillic letterforms.

The workshop is designed to be mostly self-paced and adapted to your skill level. You’ll work digitally on your laptop using your preferred software, with guidance and feedback throughout the process. By the end of the three days, you will have completed your first Cyrillic typeface style.

Alongside hands-on work, the workshop includes a few lectures—mainly on the history of Cyrillic—as well as small exercises to help you grasp the nuances of Cyrillic letterforms.

Sun–Tue, June 29–1, 2025
10am–5pm
$505
Details and registration

Type Design for Non-Type Designers with Matteo Bologna, Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

Type Design for Non-Type Designers
with Matteo Bologna, Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

In this two-day class, you will learn the basics of designing and generating a variable font with the font-design software Glyphs (Mac only). Go beyond choosing the same typefaces from the type menu to creating your own!

On the first day, we will learn the basics of drawing a font, generate the font, and use it in an Adobe app or a web browser. In the afternoon, we will add additional letters to the font, learning how to space them, add diacritics and punctuation.

On the second day, we will add more letters, design a bold version of the same typeface, create a variable font—and make it animate in a web browser. At the end of the class, you will probably not have a finished font, but a respectable start and a deep understanding about how fonts are made. And maybe you’ll become a type design addict. You have been warned.

Level and prerequisites: beginner, no prior knowledge necessary. Bring your MacBook.

Sun–Mon, June 29–30, 2025
10am–6pm
$625
Details and registration

After Effects Tools with Daniel Wenzel

After Effects Tools
with Daniel Wenzel

One-day crash course in procedural workflows within Adobe After Effects. This workshop focuses on building modular setups, toolkits, and systems using native AE features, and scripting.

We’ll cover core techniques including expressions, expression controls, precomp structures, and the Essential Graphics panel—all aimed at helping you develop workflows that are flexible and scalable. The class is fast-paced and hands-on, with a mix of demos and guided exercises. Participants are encouraged to build along, experiment, and ask questions throughout the day.

The course is most suitable for mid-level professionals with a base knowledge of After Effects. No prior coding experience is required.

Sun, June 29, 2025
10am–6pm
$312
Details and registration

Type on Grids with June Shin

Type on Grids
with June Shin

Love grids? Great. Hate them? Let me change your mind. Grids don’t have to be boring or rigid. In this workshop, you’ll unlock their expressive potential by constructing your own grid to use as both a tool and a design element in creating a set of custom letterforms. We’ll briefly cover the structure and conventions of the Latin alphabet, explore how modularity can bring visual harmony—even to eccentric styles—and craft a unique piece of lettering based on the grid you develop from scratch.

Sun, June 29, 2025
10am–5pm
$275
Details and registration

Green-Wood Cemetery Lettering Walk with Raven Mo

Green-Wood Cemetery Lettering Walk
with Raven Mo

Step away from the screens and into a world of carved letters — Green-Wood Cemetery.

Green-Wood Cemetery Lettering Walk is a guided tour through Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, where the headstones and mausoleums serve as open-air archives of typographic and lettering history.

Founded in 1838, this historic Brooklyn cemetery is home to generations of New Yorkers and an extraordinary range of carved lettering and ornamented inscriptions that reveal how design conventions shift over time. On this guided walk, we’ll focus on 18th and 19th century gravestones with attention to craft and typographic detail.

Whether you’re a letterform obsessed designer, a vernacular typography enthusiast, or just curious about how we commemorate life through design, this tour invites you to see the cemetery as both a site of reflection and a museum of letterforms.

Sun, June 29, 2025
10am–12pm

Details and registration

Curator’s Tour: Puerto Rico in Print: The Posters of Lorenzo Homar

Curator’s Tour: Puerto Rico in Print: The Posters of Lorenzo Homar

Join us at the Poster House for a private viewing of the work of Lorenzo Homar, a pioneering printmaker, poster designer, calligrapher, painter, illustrator, caricaturist, and costume and theatrical set designer. Active from the 1950s through the 1990s, few equal his impact and influence as a teacher of poster design and printmaking in Latin America.

Wed, July 2, 2025
6–7pm
$10.00
Details and registration

And more soon …

More workshops and tours are being planned to take place between June 23 and July 3, and will be announced over the coming weeks. For updates and announce­ments, join the Typographics mailing list and follow Typographics on Mastodon and Instagram.

Stay Updated

More info about this year’s Typographics will be announced in the coming weeks.

Join the mailing list to get the latest news and announcements:

Also follow Typographics on Mastodon and Instagram.