FRIDAY–SATURDAY, AUGUST 07–08
Workshops
FRIDAY
Making Fonts is Only Part of Making Fonts
WHEN: Friday, August 07, 2026
TIME: 8:00a–11:30a
LEADER: Dan Rhatigan & Doug Wilson
WHERE: Assembly Lounge at Revolution Hall, 2nd floor
Assembly Lounge is situated diagonally across the hall from the main entrance of the auditorium.
Creating type on a computer has never been easier or more accessible, but designing your typefaces are only the first step in establishing yourself as a type foundry. With a little more investment, you can set up an online store and offer your fonts for sale. BUT THEN WHAT?
This workshop will help you understand the surprising challenges and complexities that come with running a digital type foundry in today’s markets. Dan Rhatigan, who has worked with Monotype, Adobe, Type Network, and his own foundry, Bijou Type; and Doug Wilson, independent type writer and founder of Type Advisor, will share their combined decades of type industry experience and discuss establishing your foundry brand, marketing and promotion, sales and distribution, and other things to consider as you build your business. We will discuss what combination of strategies might be right for YOU, as well as for the people who’ll want to work with your fonts.
Dan Rhatigan
Doug Wilson is a creative director, writer, filmmaker, and cyclist that lives in Denver, Colorado with over 20 years of experience in design and typography.
He has worked with many companies including Starbucks, Monotype, Herman Miller, and Virgin Mobile. He has presented at The New York Times, NASA, Condé Nast, TypeCon, TYPO Berlin, and ATypI. In 2012, Doug directed the feature-length documentary “Linotype: The Film” which screened internationally.
He recently launched Type Advisor, a font consulting company for type foundries and users of type alike. He also continues working on his Linotype Book Project sharing how an old typesetting machine still has things to teach us in the 21st century.
COST: $125
Limited to 10 participants
SATURDAY
Type Crit
WHEN: Saturday, August 08, 2026
TIME: 8:00a–11:30a
LEADERS: Glenda Bellarosa, John Downer, Gen Ramírez
WHERE: Assembly Lounge at Revolution Hall, 2nd floor
Assembly Lounge is situated diagonally across the hall from the main entrance of the auditorium.
The famous Type Crit gives designers a critique on their in progress typeface. Included with the Type Crit, Glenda will also do font quality assurance for the designer if they have binary data (OTF/TTF/VF) for testing. This QA includes a preliminary technical check of the fonts in Font Bakery and an explanation of the results and how to resolve them. Glenda will share some resources and tools that will help bring their fonts to OpenType Specifications and/or meet basic user expectations. Designers should email Glenda binary data at least 24 hours before the workshop.
Glenda Bellarosa is a font developer and font engineer, currently contracting with Adobe Fonts as their Library Administrator. She also runs Maria Glenda Bellarosa LLC. Her clients include The Type Founders, Contrast Foundry, and Sharp Type. Glenda has been working in type for more than three decades. She started out hinting TrueType fonts at Monotype and Font Bureau. While at Monotype, she gained extensive knowledge in both writing OpenType code and the intricacies of complex South Asian scripts, Arabic, and symbolic scripts. Looking to help support the development and preservation of minority scripts and languages, Glenda joined Unicode in 2024. She is as passionate about producing functionally correct and efficient fonts as she is about doing the daily Wordle.
Instagram
Mr. Downer is a sign painter, a typeface designer, and an educator. He has written about type and type history for various publications and is widely known as a perceptive type critic. His typefaces have been published by Bitstream, Font Bureau, Emigre, House Industries, and Design Lab. Among his most popular type designs are Iowan Old Style (on Apple Books and iOS 7+), Roxy, Ironmonger, and the ubiquitous food and beverage branding favorite, Brothers.
A native of the Pacific Northwest, a region of the US with a rich history of sign painting and hand-lettering, Mr. Downer was first introduced to commercial pen & brush lettering in the 1960s in junior high school. He began an apprenticeship in a sign painting shop at age 18. He holds BA, MA, and MFA degrees in art.
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Gen Ramírez is a typeface designer, graphic designer, calligrapher and sign-painter from Guadalajara, Mexico. His strong interest and passion for brushes and letterforms developed at a young age as he was taught the mastery of sign-painting in his father’s workshop. It later led him to graduate from TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague as well as completing both the Type@Cooper Extended program in San Francisco and Condensed program in New York.
He teaches calligraphy, sign-painting, and type design workshops, and leads Letrastica Festival, a conference in Guadalajara. With strong roots in an organic approach to letterforms, his work focuses on embracing both the analog and digital dimensions of design.
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COST: FREE
Limited to 10 participants