News
The Knuth-Bigelow Type Design Incubator
We’re partnering with Stanford to keep languages alive through type design education.
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.
The vast majority of approximately 7,000 languages lack the necessary digital infrastructure, including typefaces, to be used on keyboards and screens. As part of our mission to support the decolonization of design, we recognize that typeface design is crucial for achieving digital equity. Our partnership with KBI represents an in-depth and targeted opportunity to expand the design canon beyond Latin-based scripts. This collaboration complements the Archive’s existing educational offerings in typeface design, which include Introduction to Modern Type Design, a 10-week online workshop, and Type West, a yearlong type design program held in-person in San Francisco and online for global participants.
Just 24 students out of over 400 applicants to the KBI program worldwide were selected to participate in the inaugural five-week course, and all received full scholarships. Starting June 23, classes will meet twice a week over Zoom, scheduled at the most convenient times for a group of students hailing from a total of 17 countries across six time zones. Decolonizing Latin will cover the basics of the Latin writing system to enable the extended coverage employed by many African, Asian, and Indigenous North and South American languages. The course will be led by main instructor and independent type designer Fer Cozzi for the Archive. Two other cohorts, learning to design Arabic or Southeast Asian scripts, will be headed up by Lisa Huang at Words of Type, with the help of guest instructors and lecturers from the language communities represented.
Decisions about how and if a language should exist in digital spaces belong solely to its speakers. These choices can be complex, influenced by political issues like distrust of colonial language systems imposed upon a population, suppressing dialects and native languages. Some students, like Ashley Stewart of Nigeria, plan to develop a typeface inspired by Ulli and Nsibidi—visual traditions rooted in symbolic communication and abstract form. Osmond Tshuma, an MFA Graphic Design student at the Rhode Island School of Design, is working to digitize the Umwero Script, a writing system developed to represent Kinyarwanda more accurately. He is also working on Isiko Script, an attempt to develop a writing system based on the daily life of the Northern Ndebele people. In his application to KBI, he wrote, “This project captures the culture, extracting forms from objects of everyday life to celebrate and preserve its heritage.”
As the students in the Decolonizing Latin cohort hail from nine different countries, a main goal of the Incubator is to create a supportive online learning environment where students can collaborate, learn, share traditions, and practice together. In keeping with the Archive’s mission of providing radical access to design resources, all KBI participants will receive a yearlong Letterform Archive membership and instruction on using our Online Archive, including the “tables” feature for curating and sharing collections of items—a valuable source of inspiration as students begin to research and design their typefaces.
Many entities and individuals joined together to support the KBI launch: Adobe provided one-year Creative Cloud licenses for the students, and Glyphs offered one-year licenses for type design software. An anonymous donor’s generous financial support awarded scholarships for all the students, and a KBI Advisory Board made up of faculty and alumni from world-renowned organizations, including Fiona Ross, Gerry Leonidas, Thomas Huot-Marchand, and Nadine Chahine offered their expertise pro bono. A long list of distinguished guest critics and speakers have also volunteered their time to contribute to the program.
Each language offers a distinct cultural viewpoint, broadening our shared understanding of the human experience. The Knuth Bigelow Incubator has secured funding for an additional two years, helping to bring digital language representation to historically underserved populations and keep their writing systems (and, by extension, languages) alive for future generations.
— Angela Riechers, Education Director
Want to learn type design, but didn’t make it into the KBI program? Letterform Archive’s Type West program and Intro to Modern Type Design workshop offer other opportunities to master font making. Scholarships are available.