Type West In-Person

Kel Troughton, Co-Instructor for Term 1, is a type designer, lettering artist, graffiti writer, and educator, living in Oakland CA. He started writing graffiti in 2000 and has continued to add letter-based interests ever since. Kel teaches workshops on type and lettering, as well as co-teaching in the Type West program since 2020. He studied Type design at Type@Cooper West, worked at Monotype, and currently works on freelance type and lettering projects. His company Overlap Type focuses on type design that utilizes ideas from his graffiti experience. In short, Kel is a letter person.

Christopher Slye, Co-Instructor for Term 2, is a type professional living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He first worked as an independent type designer, developer, and consultant before joining Adobe’s typographic staff in 1997, where he helped to expand the design and functionality of Adobe Originals typefaces. Later, he guided Adobe’s type-related technology and initiatives and contributed to the development of open web font standards. He eventually managed all aspects of Adobe’s business and type licensing programs, including the Adobe Fonts subscription service, until 2020. He was president of Type Network from 2021 to 2023.

Miguel Sousa, Co-Instructor for Term 3, is a Portuguese-American type designer and font developer, with a degree in Technology and Graphic Arts from the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar, and a Masters in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, England.

While studying at Reading, Miguel designed Calouste: a typeface covering both Latin and Armenian scripts, which received a Type Directors Club award in 2006. That same year, he joined the Type Development team at Adobe in San Jose, California. There he has continued his focus on non-Latin language systems, and mastering the details of font technologies. After a stint managing Western type development, he’s now part of the team that creates and maintains services that provide fonts to millions of people..

Miguel maintains adhesiontext.com, a resource for dynamically generating dummy text in a multitude of languages.

Chris McDonald, Type History Instructor for Term 1, is a calligrapher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Long affiliated with the Friends of Calligraphy craft guild, he has studied with numerous scribes regionally, nationally and internationally, and has taught privately and for FOC since 2015. During the day he works as an archivist at a local university. Always craving the pleasures of hand-crafted work, his broader interests include lettering, drawing, bookbinding, and related book and paper arts.

Grendl Löfkvist, Type History Instructor for Terms 2 and 3, teaches type history and theory in the Certificate Program. Outside the Archive, Grendl teaches the history of graphic design, book arts, typography, and letterpress printing at City College of San Francisco, as well as calligraphy at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Grendl has ink in her veins: she was an offset press operator for 20 years, and she serves on the board of directors for the American Printing History Association’s Northern California chapter. Her interests include the study of printing as a subversive “Black Art” and she’s always on the lookout for bizarre or macabre print, type, and lettering lore (she is a bit of a goth).