News / Education

Accompanied by a celebratory publication, Type for All! Ten Years of Type West emphasizes the relationship between Letterform Archive’s collection and the typefaces created by the students in our year-long certificate program. With original work from every cohort since the program’s inception, the exhibition tracks the evolution of a pedagogy balancing historical reverence with contemporary practice and highlights a select showcase of the very best student typefaces.

We are excited to announce a meaningful way to support Type West students through accessible and high-impact giving. What’s Type West? Type West is a yearlong, postgraduate certificate program in type design available in person in San Francisco or online to students worldwide. We are exceedingly proud of this program, which is now celebrating its tenth year!

How can you support the future of type design through historically grounded, accessible education? Consider joining the Small Foundry Fund.

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since the inaugural class of Type West (then known as Type@Cooper West) welcomed its first type design students! In 2025, we graduated 24 talented individuals from our local cohort in San Francisco and 17 other cities worldwide. The website showcasing the Class of 2025’s final typeface projects is now live!

As Type West’s class of 2025 rolls into its final term, we’re marking a major milestone: after this year, more than 200 students (including Type@Cooper West classes of 2017 and 2018) residing in 22 countries will have graduated from the yearlong certificate program.

Many of the world’s languages are under-supported by digital typography. A crucial step toward change is inclusive type design education that meets the next generation of font makers where they are.

Letterform Archive is thrilled to announce its participation in the Knuth-Bigelow Type Design Incubator (KBI), a new educational partnership with SILICON, Stanford University’s initiative to advance digital inclusion and protect lower-resourced languages from extinction. Stanford Professor Thomas Mullaney, co-director of SILICON, is the driving force behind this effort to support digitally-disadvantaged languages. The inaugural five-week course was developed jointly by Lisa Huang from Words of Type, and Grendl Löfkvist and Angela Riechers from the Archive.

We presented two dozen lectures and salons in 2024, both online and onsite at the Archive. Unless you’re our biggest fans (thank you!), you likely didn’t get to catch them all. So, here are a few videos that are worth some of your holiday downtime, from insightful looks at design history to new approaches that will exercise your typographic eye.

As we embark on a new year of Type West, our certificate program in type design, we’d like to share some major milestones.

In 2023 Letterform Archive hosted dozens of online and onsite events exploring typographic history and contemporary design, and covering a wide range of writing systems and locales, from Arabic to Cherokee, Buenos Aires to Vienna.