Type West Program Information

is a type designer and the founder and creative director of Contrast Foundry (CoFo), an independent type foundry she established in 2014. Based in San Francisco, she runs CoFo as an international studio developing retail and custom typefaces, with a strong focus on multilingual type design. Her work balances expressive letterforms with carefully constructed typographic systems. Her typefaces have received international awards and recognitions, including honors from the Type Directors Club, Red Dot, Tokyo TDC, D&AD, Communication Arts, and Morisawa. Alongside her studio practice, Maria organizes workshops, teaches, gives talks, and mentors emerging designers around the world.

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.

is a graphic & UI/UX designer based in San Francisco, with clients including Apple, Flinto, and Juice Shop. His online course platform Sketch Master has trained thousands of designers around the world, and he has led workshops for design teams at Google, Fitbit, and many creative agencies.

is a typeface designer and the founder of A+, where he works on original projects and custom commissions. Graham contributed to projects at MCKL, and got his start at Frere-Jones Type. He has been an instructor at Letterform Archive since 2017. He is a graduate of the Type@Cooper program at The Cooper Union, and the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Berkeley with his wife, cookbook author Maria Zizka, and their two boys.

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).

is a British Iranian Partner & Designer at Dogray and former font developer at Dalton Maag foundry. 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 in Birmingham, the Type Directors Club in New York, and the Beatrice Warde Scholarship. 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—⁠investigating the technological, cultural, and political dimensions of typography and printing, and how these facets converge through various historical contexts.

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.

is a type designer, programmer, sign painter and occasional 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.

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.

is the author of The Golden Thread, an essential book on the history of calligraphy and typography. He is currently teaching at the Royal Drawing School in London and the University of Sunderland, where he co-directs the International Calligraphy Research Centre. In 2013 he was awarded the first Karl-Georg Hoefer prize by The Schreibwerkstatt Klingspor for his work in calligraphy and education.

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.

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).