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A look at the process of creating Roboto Serif and some other ideas it generated.

The type design process can go down any number of roads. It often follows a familiar archetype, gets a jump-start by a particular tool, or merges a variety of ideas. In some cases, starting points that are informed by common examples, or uncovered in otherwise overlooked places, offer unexpected creative detours. House Industries’ type director, Ken Barber, will look at the inspirational sources hiding in plain sight which steered the development of the foundry’s forthcoming release, Municipal.

Sandoll members introduce some design, technical, and teamwork-related challenges they have encountered to create East Asian scripts, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as a one font family.

Hangul (Korean Alphabet) will be introduced and parts of this alphabet that correspond with the Latin alphabet will be discussed. These short lecture will be divided into the history of Hangul, design principles, writing tools, space and structure, writing direction. An interesting introduction to Hangul using analogies with easily understandable materials will be provided for people who are unfamiliar with Hangul.

John will give constructive feedback for 4 designers. Prepare to send PDF of proofs in advance. Sign up.

We’ll be working with participants to make a piece of lettering (optional illustration integration) as an ex libris. By working with black and white, participants would exercise their notions of space, composition, proportion, balance of shapes and countershapes; and how to translate and transmit certain idea and values to letters. Register to join.

A través de un pequeño taller variable (4 Hrs) se diseñará un logotipo variable (4 a 6 letras) utilizando la el software de dibujo tipográfico Glyphsapp, para esto por favor instale la prueba gratuita de 30 días, la instalación debe hacerla antes del taller. En este espacio se explorará desde lo básico del dibujo tipográfico, la identidad de marca y por ultimo la variabilidad tipográfica a partir de dos “masters de dibujo”. El resultado final se verá reflejado en Mockups listos para testear la marca variable. Register to Join.

These days when the democratized use of typography is widespread throughout the world and its design is booming and probably proliferating in rooms for teenagers looking to have fun.



I am producing a podcast about typography.

Ready to be released in July. I’m still fine tuning details.



I have always loved radio since I was a child.

And typography since I started college.



It will be in Spanish.

This raises two questions.



Why typeface? And why in Spanish? if there is already Don Serifa in charge of Pedro Arilla, senior designer at Fontsmith, now Monotype.



First of all because the typography is fun.

It is everywhere.



Secondly, because Spanish is the most widely spoken language in the world that uses Latin alphabet.



And I think that the culture and the greatest technological development and production of typography have occurred between Anglo-Saxon cultures and countries, I would like to facilitate that for Latin America.



I’m not looking to argue, much less divide.

But to make knowledge more accessible for experts, but especially for those people who do not understand what we do when they ask us in a meeting, what do you do? and we answer them; to design typography.

A short slide lecture/presentation showing the process of designing two digital typefaces based on letters carved in stone.

Our personal view on trend in modern typography.

Reflexiones desde la experiencia en la búsqueda de particularidad en el campo profesional y el proceso de diseño. Ideas sobre métodos, errores y aprendizaje en el desarrollo de fuentes tipográficas.

En México desde hace aproximadamente 16 años, cada vez es más frecuente encontrar a grandes marcas recurriendo a tipógrafos para generar sus propias tipografías. En éste contexto, hemos visto que varias generaciones de tipógrafos emergentes han desarrollado alrededor de 40 proyectos custom y que la creciente demanda ha sido producto de tipografías muy bien cuidadas y con propuestas sólidas. Incluso podemos hablar de que en México llevamos tres sexenios (tiempo que dura cada gobernante en el poder), viendo estos encargos tipográficos. Es por ello que me interesa mostrar éste panorama de México y al mismo tiempo una pequeña muestra de mi práctica tipográfica en ésta contexto.

Short animated presentation on my path of mostly self-taught amateur type designer, and my many self-initiated projects that I’m able to keep up with passionately, and convert into real paying work and valuable experience. Lots of lettering and display type to show.

Another sign painting demo, not as neat as John Downer’s but definitely flavorful.

El taller mostrará cómo crear un alfabeto usando solo un pequeño conjunto de formas básicas. Primero trabajaremos en la construcción de los typotoms y luego se desarrollará un sistema alfabético. La restricción constructiva de las letras hechas a partir de módulos es un método rápido y dinámico para construir sistemas y permitir que surjan nuevas y sorprendentes formas de letras.

In 2014 and 2016 I have published the books Hanzi Graphy (2014 in English) and Kanji Graphy (2016 in German). Hanzi Graphy is focusing on the history, architecture and physical characteristics of Chinese characters while establishing a common set of vocabulary. Kanji Graphy is carrying it further, telling the story of how Chinese characters settled in Japan and became the root for a hybrid writing system. In the book I am thematizing how Kanji, the Japanese language and visual culture nurtured each other and finally established a “Japanese” method of typography.
The journey of this research is still going on. One topic I haven’t touched so far is analysing “readability” and “legibility” according to the different systems Alphabet, Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. It is a project that I have planned to start in April 2020, but I will use my presentation to start it now.

Sandoll members introduce some design, technical, and teamwork-related challenges they have encountered to create East Asian scripts, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as a one font family.

Con una palabra como punto de partida, cambiaremos algunas variables (tomadas del diseño de fuentes) para enriquecer la paleta de estilos que podemos hacer con un brush pen. Orientado a personas que se estén iniciando en la caligrafía y dibujo de letras.

We will experiments with abstract or organic shapes or modules to make alphabets. Participants would work on building a system, congruency; building shapes, observe space inside and between shapes to create rhythm, and to think beyond grids by seeing freedom in modularity. We’d start with creating shapes and then words to have context and develop concept. Register to join.

We will discuss Joyce’s view of how to approach the puzzle of font license agreements, so that it is a functional tool to support the other work of font professionals.  Participants in this workshop will be better prepared to work with an attorney to craft/edit their own EULA or to evaulate the terms of licensing offered by potential publishers of their work. This workshop is accessible to all levels of font proffesional.  Though not directly applicatble to the licensee experience, all are welcome. The program is particpatory and changes with each new group.  Therefore, those who have attended a previous workshop are also welcome. More instructions are available in the registration link. Registration is required.

Fontmake is a free tool that can be used to generate binary font files. For variable fonts it can be an alternative to what your font editor offers. Fontmake es una herramienta de uso libre que puede ser usada para generar archivos binarios de fuentes y puede ser una alternativa para generar fuentes variables, a las ofrecidas por editores de fuentes.

Demonstration of a RoboFont extension developed to streamline the kerning workflow at Commercial Type.

Lots of fun experiments can happen when type and technology come together. What can the machine draw when you teach it letterforms? What kinds of letters can you draw when you invent your own algorithmic tools? This talk will be about the process of creating letterforms in tandem with the computer.

A short demonstration of blackletter calligraphy, executed with a ruling pen which gives us a more dynamic way for letterforms, we will write a quote and we’ll give a morphologic meaning to every word. Example.

Introdúcete en la oscuridad del Terminal y descubre cómo hacer tu proceso de producción más efıciente a través del uso de herramientas de línea de comandos. Durante esta actividad se demostrarán los conceptos y comandos básicos del Terminal de macOS y cómo aprovechar de la variedad de herramientas de producción tipográfıcas disponibles libremente.

A discussion about how using type design software and type knowledge can improve your lettering practice.

DrawBot is great as a standalone app for small projects, but for longer code sessions, a full code editing environment provides far superior ergonomics. This session will be a walk-through of a script which uses DrawBot as a module in order to allow coding in a code editor such as VS Code. I will start a script in the Drawbot macOS app, then move it into a standalone Python script, showing how to preview results while working in the external editor.

moveTo((p,y)) is a exploration into the process behind some of my variable font animations in DrawBot, using sound, image, and time as axis controllers.

Watch this recorded event . Cem, Marie, and Nic from Occupant Fonts and Type.Tools will discuss their work developing a new kerning assistant for all you kerned-out designers. By augmenting a type designer’s instinct with a machine-learning driven assistant, we hope to improve the kerning experience from end to end. In the presentation, we’ll talk about our approach to solving this problem.

Creating audiovisual text animations can be very diffıcult & very time-consuming, especially when those animations stretch out in time beyond a few seconds — and even more so when you’re trying to use variable fonts. Coldtype is a Python library to help make that process much easier.

Introduction to Type.World’s Beta phase.

Tips and tricks for mastering fonts with the fdk, and also variable fonts.

Bring a drink and hang out in the day 2 TypeLab party hosted by TypeLab Americas. There could be some open podium time, storytelling, let’s see what happens. Come hang. Zoom only.

Thanks to the iPad, Adobe tools are changing like never before. Join Adobe’s Head of Typography, Tim Brown, for a casual chat about the evolution of typographic practice.

Exploring the formal qualities of a typeface inspired by hand-painted street signs in and around Carcavelos, Portugal, this session will unpack the typeface’s relationship to its source materials and to my own presence and position within the work, providing a structure for critically considering and effectively working with these concepts in our everyday practice.

Elementype es un libro sobre uso tipográfico que utiliza gráficos simples y claros, así como texto breve y contundente que permite a los usuarios, ya sean diseñadores o usuarios no profesionales de la tipografía, conocer la gama completa de posibilidades que puede ofrecer una fuente y la poderosa herramienta que es.
La importancia de la publicación radica no solo en su lenguaje fresco y joven, combinado con una investigación rigurosa, sino también en la contribución que tiene a la literatura especializada en el campo en español.
Esto convierte al libro en una herramienta básica de consulta para el público hispanohablante. Además , Elementype, también es un ejercicio de autoedición que contó con el apoyo del Ministerio de Cultura de México para su producción. En esta ocasión, hablaremos sobre el libro y sobre cómo el conocimiento profundo de las formas tipográficas puede hacer que la selección tipográfica sea más fácil.

Sandoll members introduce some design, technical, and teamwork-related challenges they have encountered to create East Asian scripts, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as a one font family.

The contexts we as web typographers need to manage are increasingly complex. We not only have to manage our typesetting across browser widths, but also layout variations, environment, and accessibility needs. Currently, we typeset our content explicitly for each of these contexts. This paradigm has become unmanageable and inflexible to our diverse design needs. The future of typesetting is one where we can provide instructions as to how our content responds to its contexts, instead of defıning contexts in which our content changes. Thus removing the need for breakpoints and viewport unit calculations, encapsulating all styles within the content style itself. So on your website, where you might have had multiple headline styles defıned for home page modules, sidebars, and entry pages, multiplied by the number of breakpoints, you can instead have a single headline style that adapts itself to each of these layout and screen contexts. These tight and functional typographic systems, like design systems, simplify your codebase and provides you with flexibility to make more fluid and dynamic layouts. This talk will go over the paradigm that exists, technologies that bridge into what’s coming up like CSS Locks and Variable Fonts, and fınally, go into the next generation of typesetting with tools like Typetura (disclosure I work on this) and mediums like mixed reality typography.

La legibilidad parecería ser un concepto abstracto, conectado únicamente con el campo del diseño gráfico o la tipografía, sin embargo es una característica de la escritura misma y afecta a todos los campos de la comunicación visual y escrita.
Existen toda una variedad de definiciones disponibles acerca de este concepto y son muy útiles para un diseñador tipográfico que quiere potenciar la calidad de su trabajo o para un lector que quiere mejorar su experiencia de lectura. Sin embargo estas definiciones han creado una barrera que nos separa de nuestras primeras etapas de aprendizaje de la escritura.
El propósito de esta conferencia es alcanzar una comprensión más profunda de los principios básicos de legibilidad por medio del análisis de nuestra propia escritura a mano y su comparación con diferentes teorías alrededor de este concepto.

My first encounter with the concept of legibility happened when I was a student and I was trying to understand the basic principles of typeface design. Is very common to find several definitions about legibility on the web, and most of them are related to graphic design. These kinds of approaches are very useful for a designer who tries to enhance the quality of her work or for a reader who wants to improve his reading experience. However, this terminology has created a barrier which separates our reading comprehension from our early steps of education.
My purpose with this presentation is to reach a deep knowledge of legibility values through the comparison of handwriting and different theories around this topic. The outcomes may bring us closer to an easy comprehension of these strange theories and verify that legibility is not a foreign concept to us. I truly believe that a bond exists between the first learning stages of writing and our own ability to recognize lettershapes in the present. This statement implies that all of us are able to understand the concept of legibility and typeface design without being involved in visual communication studies

Teaching students type design as the fırst project in their fırst true graphic design course from the outset may seem premature. Over the past several semesters I have been using typeface design in my Typography course as a way to help students dive deep into what makes letters work. It’s been a constant balancing act between project length, outcomes and student skill level. This presentation shares how and why I have created this project as well as some of the student outcomes with examples of their work. Through the process I’ve found students not only gain an appreciation for type and letters but they gain a real understanding of what makes typography work at an atomic scale.

Esta conferencia intenta rescatar la riqueza visual de nuestra historia gráfıca a través de la tipografía. Haremos un tour cronológico por nuestras primeras imprentas, periódicos, afıches, trabajos caligráfıcos, tipografías y más; descubriendo en el trayecto el legado de los actores más importantes de la historia gráfıca de nuestro país. English: This conference tries to rescue the visual richness of our graphic history through typography. We will take a chronological tour of our fırst printing presses, newspapers, posters, calligraphic works, typefaces and more; discovering along the way, the legacy of the most important actors in the graphic history of our country.

Letters are built with shapes and spaces between each other - a good lettering piece to me is when things are consistent and balanced. I would like to share how I fınd those in my lettering process. Will share works, process, and step-by-step examples.

Members of the staff from Fonts In Use will discuss the latest developments for the public archive of typography, and how it might be improved in the future.

Este mini-workshop tiene como objetivo mostrar las bases de las góticas y cómo podemos jugar con sus variaciones para crear una increíble etiqueta de cerveza. ( La cual a muchos nos a acompañado en esta cuarentena). Todo hecho a mano, exploraremos rápidamente: estilos, composición, jerarquía, entre otros. Necesitaremos: papel, papel calco, tinta y plumas (artesanales o caligráficas).

Presenting the results of the workshop on Thursday.

Synoptic Offıce proposes a brief introduction and demo of their recently launched Chinese Type Archive, a volunteer-run, open data resource aiming to help designers looking to use Chinese typography in their work. It features a catalogue of 230 typefaces, defınitions and resources, with information in both English and Chinese, explaining basic typographic terms and giving insight into their histories. Because many of Chinese typefaces catalogued are un-named or were named after the printer, the archive includes conventional names for the typefaces and more importantly, a stable ID number to help designers differentiate and use them with more ease. The archive uses a broad collections approach with the aim of capturing design history and fostering the dialogue, use, and evolution of Chinese typography in a globalized context. Future efforts include tools and methods for typographic analysis and data publishing. This presentation serves as both an introduction and an invitation to the global type community to participate in the dialog around Chinese type. chinesetypearchive.com

You are invited to the 1st. “Never have I ever Type Edition” a casual drinking game that will be hosted online. People from all around the world will gather from the confort of their own home and answer to the type related questions. You will have the opportunity to send your questions beforehand and add to the fun. Required material: your drink(s) of preference

The convention and wisdom of Chinese typography that was developed over centuries has failed to be inherited by designers today. This is caused partially by the Latin-orientated computer softwares and the negligence in the Chinese design education. Kǒngquè project aims to fıll this gap by revisiting the typographic traditions in China in the modern context and restoring a mindset of native Chinese typography.

Conociendo Perú a través de las letras y números de sus calles. (Learning about Peru trough the letters and numbers on its streets).

(1) Go over cross-history of polyglot typesetted print among Europe, Japan, and Korea, (2) look through recent samples from signage system, pamphlets, etc. in Japan and Korea—and see how awful the current situation of polyglot typeset is, and (3) propose the possible typeface set examples and show new perspective of polyglot typesetting. ***Speaker is specialist on English, Japanese and Korean typography; that’s why there’s brackets on “C” in the title.

Basada en el diseño de Tony Wenman de 1972, la historia de este rescate en digital nos lleva por un largo proceso de investigación y desarrollo en donde cada elemento contribuye a lograr una tipografía que toma lo mejor del formato de los transferibles en seco para llevarlas al terreno digital aprovechando las cualidades de la programación OpenType. / Based on Tony Wenman’s design form 1972, the story of this digital revival leads us to a long research and development process, in which each element contributes to achieve a typeface that takes the best of the dry transfer format to guide it to the digital fıeld, making use of the qualities of OpenType.

Create a typographic poster using analog techniques and enhancing its expressiveness with digital tools, therefore producing a unique and vibrant composition. Some examples.

(PRE-RECORDED-this will repeat)
I’d like to briefly discuss my recent research into new approaches and processes for creating dimensional typographic models – using Roger Excoffon’s ‘Calypso’ typeface as a blueprint. I will discuss new physical representations of the design; as 3D printed models, small paper template patterns, and larger flat plastic sheet patterns – that involve complex choreographed movement to curve and hold into typographic forms. The unveiling of these objects during my presentation – as they move from astract forms to reveal the frontal plain of Calypso letterforms – will be visually striking.

Esta presentación ofrecerá una aproximación al uso de las escalas tipográficas en el ámbito del Diseño Gráfico.