Workshops

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 FontSpector 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 an independent font developer and font engineer. Her clients include The Type Founders, Contrast Foundry, and Sharp Type. Glenda has been working in type for more than three decades.
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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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