Main Program
Day 2

11:50a–12:00p
Opening remarks

12:00p–12:20p
Create Typefaces Today?
Jean François Porchez

With the rise of social media, we’re bombarded with new typefaces, some excellent, others mediocre. How can we regain control over the quality of our designs? Social media is unregulated, and AI has blurred the lines between good and bad practises. Before technology consumes everything, can we regain control? These questions haunt me every time I create a new typeface.

I’ve set rules for myself through recent projects. I’m not sure what I’ll say, but I want to answer universal questions: Is it healthy to reimagine a classic typeface like Helvetica or Times? How can we avoid reproducing existing styles to avoid contradicting our need for innovation? How can we compartmentalise ourselves from contemporary influences in the creative process? Should we draw everything directly on the screen, or should we return to drawing without Bézier curves?

I have work ahead, but the challenge is worth it.

12:20p–12:40p
Ode to Crosley: A Typographic Tribute to a Brutalist Monster
Juju Stojanovic

Crosley Tower has been called many names: a landmark, an eyesore, a friend, a monster, a guardian angel. An equally loved and hated piece of Brutalist architecture and local lore, it was infamously built in a single pour of concrete over 18 straight days for the University of Cincinnati in 1969. Crosley’s uniqueness has created a multi-generational cult following with handmade tributes in the form of drawings, sculptures, memes, and more. But today, at 57 years old, its 17 stories of solid concrete are in the midst of demolition.

During my last semesters of school, I created my own ode to Crosley: two companion typefaces, Crosley Display + Crosley Text. But what started as a student passion project of creating a typeface, out of sentimentality and humor, turned into a pursuit of using type design as an act of historic and cultural preservation.

Ode to Crosley is a book of communally contributed history, interviews, and personal projects from 130 individuals, typeset in the Crosley Type Family, serving as a monument to the monumental legacy of the tower. By highlighting these stories, the project reveals that Brutalism is not just austere concrete, but is actually full of humanity.

12:40p–1:00p
Letters Under Constraint: The Visual Language of Soviet Lettering
Aleksandra Ivanova

What happens to lettering when there are almost no typefaces to choose from? 

In the USSR, strict typographic regulations and isolation from international design left designers with an extremely limited range of available fonts. Rather than producing uniformity, these constraints pushed lettering to become the dominant visual language of Soviet culture, appearing on film titles, packaging, signage, industrial appliances, and posters, each form shaped directly by hand.

This talk draws from Soviet Lettering, a visual research book exploring an overlooked tradition of Soviet graphic culture. It looks at how designers developed a rich and flexible system of hand-drawn letterforms: the structural principles behind different media, the role of the materials they were made from, and the decorative elements that gave Soviet lettering its unmistakable rhythm. For the typographic and lettering community, this is a largely undiscovered visual tradition that continues to quietly influence contemporary design.

1:00p–1:20p
Challenging Patterns of Supremacy
Dave Pabellon

Since its inception, Dark Matter U (DMU) has worked through communal knowledge and organizing to create antiracist forms of knowledge production, collective practice, community, and design. This talk centers on an example of the collective’s work in practice, the design of the newly released “Challenging Patterns of Supremacy,” MAS CONTEXT 2025. Drawn from the lecture and workshop of the same name, held at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design in September 2022, this experimental publication offers a series of provocations on consent, power, supremacy, institutions, and hope that can serve as a basis for oppositional practices.

Using the lens of typography and design labor, the lecture’s intent is to question and reflect on how one’s practice can truly challenge supremacy. Using the trials and tribulations of the book’s design as a case study in content and form, the talk emphasizes moving at the speed of trust, unlearning dominance, and prioritizing humanity as we face a future with AI. As an annotated facilitation guide for design communities, this book furthers DMU’s mission to transform design by centering and serving the identity positions that are presently excluded.

1:20p–1:40p
From the Screen to the Pavement: Designing Stencils for Subversive Communication
Jacob DeGeal

I love stencil fonts. But I also hate stencil fonts. Their visual associations often default to military crates or collegiate sweatshirts. But stencils are also a vital tool in activism and subversive communication. In this presentation I document the development of my own stencil typeface, ChalkTalk, a modular stencil system that reimagines the function and semiotics of stencils. Adapted from League of Moveable Type’s Raleway, individual laser-cut letter tiles snap into a portable grid, enabling anyone to spray messages onto sidewalks, paint wayfinding onto plywood, or create spontaneous protest signage that can be rearranged for tomorrow’s need. My presentation explores design decisions around glyph edits, stencil bridges, and anti-ligatures that create a stencil font elegant enough to work digitally while remaining functional on the street.

1:40p–1:50p
Q+A

1:50p–2:10p
Coffee break

2:10–2:30p
Finishing My First Typeface 50 Years Later
Mark Simonson

Is it possible—and does it even make sense—to turn a college lettering project into a viable digital type family fifty years later?

As a 20-year-old graphic design student in 1976, I designed my first typeface in an advanced lettering class. I fell in love with type design as a result and decided that someday, somehow, I wanted to become a type designer. It took nearly twenty years to publish my first font, and thirty before I was designing type full time.

And now, fifty years later, I had the crazy idea to turn my naïve but earnest college project into a modern, fully-featured type family, informed by decades of type design experience.

In this talk, I will cover the inspirations and aims of my 1976 design, how I came to pick up where I left off, and the changes and refinements I made to it fifty years later.

2:30p–2:50p
ADA Code Signage & How I Know Typographers Had Nothing To Do With It
Jenn Contois

In a design landscape where typography must constantly adapt, responding to fluid screen sizes, dynamic interfaces, and ever‑evolving digital platforms, there remains one area where the expectations have stayed almost entirely unchanged for more than a decade. Since becoming codified in 2010, the Americans with Disabilities Act established strict, highly specific requirements governing what typography can and cannot be within built environments.

This presentation will explore the rules that define it, the challenges it presents, and the opportunities it creates for designers committed to accessibility / inclusivity. By unpacking the technical nuances of the regulations, we’ll look at how type designers and environmental graphic designers can meet these standards while still expressing the soul of a brand and making spaces more inclusive, intuitive, and welcoming.

2:50p–3:10p
Collective Orchestration: Publishing as Typographic Laboratory
Feixue Mei

How can publishing move beyond the private studio to become a collective orchestration of typographic form? I examine a multi-institutional initiative at James Madison University reimagining publishing as a dynamic, multi-dimensional grid. Integrating letterpress, Risograph, and zine-making, the project functions as a decentralized laboratory for testing the boundaries of legibility.

I discuss “Curation as Typographic Logic,” where the voices of over 50 contributors act as individual glyphs within a polyphonic body. Beyond aesthetics, typography becomes a living specimen of knowledge production. By analyzing this ecosystem of workshops, a symposium, and an art book fair, I propose the “Living Archive.” This framework reimagines the spatial arrangement of text as a visceral witness to cross-cultural experience and the continuous negotiation of contemporary identity.

3:10p–3:30p
The Shape of Meaning: A Typographic View of Icons
Thalia Echevarria Fiol

Before SVGs, design systems, and icon libraries, there were ornaments and dingbats, symbols embedded within typographic systems. Often dismissed as decorative or peripheral, these forms were part of a broader typographic tradition that treated symbols as structured, repeatable elements within a shared framework.

In this talk, I argue that ornaments are not a side note in typographic history, but a foundation for how we think about icons today.

Looking beyond individual typefaces, I explore how symbols have historically been organized within typographic systems, from printer’s ornaments to dingbats and symbol fonts. These practices reveal how designers created coherence across diverse forms and balanced consistency with expression, principles that remain central to icon design.

This talk reframes icon design as an extension of typographic thinking, where icons behave like glyphs and systems matter more than individual shapes.

3:30p–3:50p
Built, Not Born: What it Takes to Grow a Type Design Ecosystem
Chen-Yin Chiang

Every type community wants more designers, but the path from curiosity to career rarely holds together. Some fall through the gap between the desk and the market. Others never find the door in the first place.

In Taiwan, Chinese typeface design made these gaps impossible to ignore. Formal education covered logotype, not typeface. Know-how stayed inside studios. The market favored established foundries. And the sheer scale of the character set made independent design seem barely viable.

This talk traces a decade-long attempt to close these gaps: a community prompt that builds type literacy; a scholarship that guides aspiring designers through an initial concept; and an incubator bridging design to commercial publication.

Each initiative addresses a different gap. Together: from curiosity, to craft, to career.

The results are people. Scholarship recipients who published complete typefaces. Incubator designers who left with commercial success. None had a conventional path in—because there were none.

That shift was the making of an ecosystem. It taught us that type education isn’t just about craft. It’s about building the environment for the craft—and the crafter—to survive.

3:50–4:00p
Q+A

4:00p–4:20p
Coffee break

4:20–4:40p
Variable Fonts: Where the Heck Are We?
Doug Wilson

Ten years into variable fonts, the type industry has largely embraced the technology. Everyone else hasn’t. In spring 2026, Wilson conducted 30+ recorded interviews with type designers, web designers, and graphic designers to find out why—and what, if anything, is going to change it.

The findings are candid, sometimes surprising, and occasionally uncomfortable. Not a single interviewee had a client proactively request a variable font. Parametric fonts are unknown outside a tiny circle of specialists. And the gap between the people who make type and the people who use it is wider than most of us want to admit.

This talk presents the patterns, the direct quotes, and the honest conclusions from one of the most comprehensive practitioner surveys of variable font adoption conducted to date—and what it suggests about where the technology goes from here.

4:40–5:00p
Coding and Kerning: Teaching Typography in Virtual Reality
Grace Spee

Creative Coding at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is an interdisciplinary course exploring interactive media and virtual reality. Open to design and computer science students, it focuses on 3D interaction and typography using UIC’s CAVE2 system at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

The course centers on a single project: an interactive 3D scene for CAVE2 addressing a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal. This structure presents pedagogical challenges, requiring faculty to teach coding to design students, and design to computer science students, while navigating differences in culture and learning approaches. This iteration also includes students from UIC’s new Computer Science + Design program, a collaboration between the Schools of Design and the College of Engineering.

Typography serves as a central focus of the projects. Rather than emphasizing game development or realism, students use type as a primary expressive medium to communicate complex global issues in immersive environments. This presentation outlines strategies for teaching typography to computer science students, bridging disciplines, and introducing best practices for typography in virtual reality.

5:00p–5:20p
Tall Fonts Without Serifs: Teaching Search to Speak Typography
Pranay Kumar and Praveen Kumar Dhanuka

How do you search for a font you can picture but can’t name? Designers face this daily. Current font browsers offer 100+ filters spanning weight, width, contrast, x-height, OpenType features, and semantic tags. Powerful—but overwhelming. You already need to speak the language of typography to use it.

We asked: What if the tool understood yours?

We built a system that translates plain-language queries—“something elegant for a wedding invite, with swashes”—into structured typographic filters. The catch? Typography trips up AI. “Serif” isn’t a mood. “Display” isn’t a screen. Teaching a language model to think like a type designer, not a thesaurus, required building an entirely new layer of typographic rules.

This talk shares what we learned: how we mapped the messy human language of font selection onto precise typographic attributes, which AI assumptions broke spectacularly, and why the hardest part wasn’t the technology—it was defining what designers actually mean when they say “clean” or “modern.” We’ll show real queries, real failures, and the moments that changed our thinking.

No AI hype. Just type nerds teaching machines to be type nerds.

5:20p–5:40p
The Last Human Layer
Wenting Zhang and Hua Shu

AI can generate a logo in seconds. A decent one, even.

For designers, the AI boom has raised deep questions about value, authorship, and what it means to make something with intention. We’ve felt it ourselves. Our answer keeps coming back to typography. Type is where intention lives. Great typography is not just technically correct. It is purposeful, emotionally precise, and unmistakably human.

Drawing from our experience building design tools, we explore how designers discover and use type, what designers want from it, and why so much of its expressive power stays hidden. Alternate glyphs, variable axes, and OpenType features have long existed. Without intuitive ways to access them, most designers never used them. When these features become visible, something shifts. Typography becomes less about selecting a font and more about shaping it.

As AI becomes embedded in design workflows, the designer’s role is not disappearing. It is becoming more deliberate. Attendees will leave with a framework for type as intentional choice, ways to use advanced features expressively, and how to work alongside AI without losing authorship.

Type was here before AI. We think it will outlast it, too.

5:40p–5:50p
Closing remarks

6:00p
Volumes Market closes