Type West Online

Sahar Afshar, Lead Instructor for Type West Online, is an independent type designer and researcher based in London. She holds a PhD in Printing History from Birmingham City University, and is part of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Printing History and Culture. She divides her time between her practice as a type designer with over a decade of experience in working on various retail and custom fonts, and her research, which investigates the technological, cultural, and political dimensions of typography and printing, and how these facets converge through various historical contexts. When she is not drawing letterforms or researching their histories, she teaches type, writes about type, talks about type, and indulges in hobbies that have nothing at all to do with type, and drinks too much tea.

Michele Patanè, Co-Instructor for Type West Online Term 1, lives and works in London and is a type designer, researcher and visiting lecturer at the University of Reading, UK, and ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland. From 2012 to 2019 he worked at Dalton Maag studio in London, where he served as senior type designer and team manager, contributing to the development of internationally prominent projects. Her research focuses on the use of historical patterns in type design practice.

Romina Hernández, Co-Instructor for Type West Online Term 2,  is a type designer, programmer, sign painter and ocassional woodworker from México City.She holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design, is a self taught graphic designer, and a graduate of the TypeMedia program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in the Netherlands.These days Romina spends her days designing and creating coding projects and tools for creatives with her team at Tortilla.studio, teaching workshops, making tea, and fixing her bikes. She’s a proudly trans feminist and a cat lady.

Fer Cozzi, Co-Instructor for Type West Online Term 3, is an independent type designer from Argentina. She graduated from the University of Buenos Aires where she earned a postgraduate specialization in Type Design and now teaches in the school’s Master of Typeface Design program. Fer has participated in several typography events around the world, and her work has been selected for renowned typography exhibitions and competitions.

Type History & Theory

Briar Levit, Type History Instructor for Term 2, is a Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University. She spent her early career as Art Director of Bitch magazine, and as an independent book designer. Her feature-length documentary, Graphic Means, established an obsession with alternative design history, leading her to co-direct The People’s Graphic Design Archive and edit the book, Baseline Shift: Previously Untold Stories of Women Throughout Graphic Design History.

Grendl Löfkvist, Dean of Type West (she/her), teaches type history and theory in the Type West 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).