Events
The Past is Always Present: Chosmos—Time Travel in Heavyweight Type
with Cristian Vargas
Decoding a decade-long journey through graffiti, signage, and stone carving.
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In Chosmos: Time Travel in Heavyweight Type, Colombian designer Cristian Vargas reveals the decade-long journey behind his latest typeface. Beginning with graffiti explorations in the ’90s, the talk traces a path through carved stone signage in The Hague, painted elevator letters in a Mexico City art deco building, house numbers in San Francisco, and sketchbooks filled with forms sparked by a 2024 trip to Japan.
Blending personal memory with typographic research, Chosmos is both expressive and archival—a hybrid of vernacular references and original design thinking. Cristian will present photographs, sketches, and process work that show how Chosmos evolved into a family of bold, organic styles. Alongside this, he will showcase historical type specimens from the Letterform Archive and highlight the work of other designers who’ve explored the fluid edge of letterform design.
Released in April 2025, Chosmos features three styles—Backslant, Regular, and Slant—that invite rhythm, contrast, and motion into contemporary display typography. The result is a meditation on how type can hold time—how letterforms serve as artifacts that connect places, people, and eras.
Cristian Vargas
Cristian Vargas is a Colombian type designer and creative director based between San Francisco and New York City. He is the founder of Typozon, a brand Identity design consultancy and independent type foundry specializing in expressive, culturally resonant letterforms and identity systems.
His engagement with typography began through graffiti in the late 1990s, where he developed a deep interest in the expressive potential of form and counterform. This early experimentation evolved into formal study: a BA in Graphic Design from Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, followed by Type@Cooper in New York, and an MA in Typeface Design from the TypeMedia program at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague.
Cristian’s type design practice is informed by his background in branding and art direction, with work spanning editorial, environmental, and digital contexts. His projects have been recognized by the Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, and AIGA’s Eye on Design, and featured in publications including TYPE Magazine, Taschen – Logo Design, NOVUM, PAGE, Computer Arts, and IdN Magazine.
In 2025, he released Chosmos, a display typeface rooted in research on vernacular signage and non-linear histories of letterform design. Through his work, Vargas explores how typography can act as a vessel for memory—bridging the personal and the collective, the contemporary and the ancestral.
