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

Useless Fonts
with David Březina, Anna Štepanovská

A virtual studio visit and talk by David Březina & Anna Štepanovská

We consider clients to make our work useful and make a living. We try to anticipate trends or win accolades from our peers. When left unchecked, the considerations become stifling. But what will happen if we choose to design all the fonts that we once deemed useless?

Mon, June 23, 2025
1–2pm
Free
Details and registration

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

-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

Demystifying Font Licensing
with Joyce Ketterer

You probably know that you don’t “buy” fonts, you “license” them… but what does that mean? Doesn’t that sound scary? In this three-hour practicum, we will explore various philosophical approaches to font licensing and develop a greater comfort level with licensing fonts. All are welcome, whether you be a graphic designer or font designer.

Wed, June 25, 2025
6–9pm
$50
Details and registration

Curator’s Tour: Fallout: Atoms for War & Peace
with Angelina Lippert

Join us at the Poster House for a private viewing of their exhibition, Fallout. This exhibition chronicles the global development of the nuclear industry, for peaceful and offensive means, examining posters that both promoted and protested its use throughout the second half of the 20th century. It features the entire General Dynamics series, long heralded as one of the finest examples of corporate propaganda ever created, as well as over 60 other posters criticizing the proliferation of nuclear technology.

Wed, June 25, 2025
6–7:30pm
$10.00
Details and registration

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

Letters That Last: Exploring Noble Signs and the New York Sign Museum 2:00PM
with Noble Signs

Established in 2013, Noble Signs is a Brooklyn-based studio dedicated to the art of hand-painted and craft signage in the New York area, specifically focusing on the vernacular lettering styles that lend our city its unique visual identity. Out of that mission, the New York Sign Museum was born. Serving as a resource for community members, historians, and designers alike, the museum is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with the mission of preserving historic signage from around the New York metropolitan area. This tour will take participants through both floors of the prewar factory building that houses the collection, allowing visitors to catch a glimpse of NYC signage history, and to get a behind the scenes peek at the ins and outs of a working signage studio.

Thu, June 26, 2025
2–3pm
Free
Details and registration

Letters That Last: Exploring Noble Signs and the New York Sign Museum 3:00PM
with Noble Signs

Established in 2013, Noble Signs is a Brooklyn-based studio dedicated to the art of hand-painted and craft signage in the New York area, specifically focusing on the vernacular lettering styles that lend our city its unique visual identity. Out of that mission, the New York Sign Museum was born. Serving as a resource for community members, historians, and designers alike, the museum is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with the mission of preserving historic signage from around the New York metropolitan area. This tour will take participants through both floors of the prewar factory building that houses the collection, allowing visitors to catch a glimpse of NYC signage history, and to get a behind the scenes peek at the ins and outs of a working signage studio.

Thu, June 26, 2025
3–4pm
Free
Details and registration

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

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

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

Designing Specimens that Sell
with Lucas Czarnecki

What makes some typefaces successful while others flop? Why do graphic, web, and other designers pick one typeface but not another? By analyzing users’ purchasing and selection decisions, a few trends become clear. Setting aside a handful of staple typefaces, designers base their choices on several factors, the most important of which is how the typeface looks in use. New fonts have not been used yet, though, which creates a problem for designers: Who will be the first to demonstrate a typeface’s potential? In this three-hour workshop, we will take on the challenge ourselves. We will enter the mind of the customer, examine their desires, pick apart our typefaces, and create specimen concepts that better convince designers to buy.

Most type designers know that they need to make specimen graphics, but in this workshop, you will learn how to make specimen graphics.

Sun, June 29, 2025
10am–1pm
$50
Details and registration

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
with Es-pranza Humphrey

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