References

Dear readers: I continue to occasionally update and add to this reference page (say hello if you happen to land here), but in general please be aware that it was last fully updated in November 2020.

This page is an incomplete, continuously-evolving, and growing database of people, practitioners, readings, foundries, and resources referenced in our Typography III class, with alliterative annotations by me. (I’m still working on adequate annotations for every listing, bear with me!) The list of artists, designers, writers, poets, and programmers mentioned here represents a diverse range of figures working with language, words, and letterforms whom we are choosing to claim as “typographers,” regardless of whether they would necessarily agree with this classification themselves. (The list may or may not also include actual self-described typographers here and there).

Assigned and further readings from each week’s class are all gathered here for a single overview of reading material from the semester. Further down is an ongoing, ever-expanding list of type designers, type foundries, and miscellaneous type resources. I sincerely invite and encourage any students, and anyone else stumbling across this page online, to suggest additions, corrections, and omissions.

Before you dive in, you might check out my ongoing, always work-in-progress, “Some Notes on Typography” document, which features advice, thoughts, tips, and one rule about typography from the perspective of a designer (me) and a reader (me too).

James Goggin

Some Typographers

Sylvia Abernathy (aka Laini) Chicago activist, artist, and designer active in the 1960s, particularly notable for her Delmark Records jazz album cover designs (read the great post linked above on Abernathy’s work by Florence Fu, erstwhile Editorial Assistant at San Francisco nonprofit Letterform Archive—more of her writing is listed under “Reading”)
Act Up Urgent graphic civil disobedience
All Right Graphics Anarchic typographic anthropomorphism from Tokyo
Alphabettes Lettering, typography, and type design by women, for everyone
Bráulio Amado (aka BAD Studio aka Bráulio Amado’s Design Studio) Prolific poster pandemonium by the bad-meaning-good New York City-based Portuguese graphic designer / illustrator
Agyei Archer Trinidad and Tobago-based designer and art director working with graphics, type, and code across an admirably wide range of projects, from packaging rural community-produced chocolate to art direction of both physical and digital album for Hatchling (my fave new music genre: Trinidadian Dream Pop!)
Katsumi Asaba The septuagenarian Japanese art director and ping pong master (seriously: sixth level)
Tauba Auerbach Artists are typographers too
Jen Bervin Poet and visual artist: forget microtypography, try NANOtypography
Julia Born This Side Down: most beautiful Swiss books, spaces, dancers, &c.
Laurenz Brunner Circular Swiss graphic design, type ’n’ typography for print, web, and space
Byggstudio (Hanna Nilsson & Sofia Østerhus) Bygg means “build” in both Swedish and Norwegian: terrazzo typography tradeswomen from Stockholm & Oslo
Jacqueline Casey (See also: Eye magazine) MIT type ’n’ image monarch
Chips Cool film titles & clips from the boys at Chips
Nathan Coley Scottish contemporary art dots, words, signs, symbols
Muriel Cooper Visible languages from the MIT Visible Language Workshop visionary
Corners Lively Hangul & Latin output from Seoul-based graphic design office and Risograph printing workshop run by Daewoong Kim and Hyojoon Jo
Ines Cox Bold Belgian typography from Antwerp
Dais Multidimensional Danish anamorphic graffiti
Sara De Bondt Calmly exuberant typographic work at all scales from the London– and Ghent-based designer and publisher (see also: Sara’s excellent Occasional Papers imprint publishing affordable books on architecture, art, design, film and literature)
Dexter Sinister The compound name of artists / graphic designers / writers / editors / publishers / software developers Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt
Dia Motion graphics mayhem from the New York-based studio
Klaus-Peter Dienst 1960s & ’70s alligrammatic typography and poetic text images from the little-known German calligrapher and outsider artist
Veronica Ditting Poised type and image prose from the Gentlewoman art director and designer
Aaron Douglas Black American painter and illustrator whose work defined the visuals of the Harlem Renaissance. The main named link takes you to an overview of his book art work at Yale’s Beinecke Library, with his beautiful lettering and typography
Emory Douglas Revolutionary graphic provocations by the erstwhile Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party (1967–1980)
W. E. B. Du Bois The famed sociologist and Black rights activist also happened to be a remarkable information designer and typographer, with the colour and geometry of his data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition beating similar modernist graphic explorations by several decades
Shannon Ebner LA-based interdisciplinary artist working with various modes of language, from poetry to political rhetoric, through the lens of photography
James Edmondson (AKA Oh No Type Co.) Chill fonts from San Francisco
Kelsey Elder Newly-joined RISD GD faculty who investigates letterforms as culturally important epicenters for queerness, subversion, and dissent
Cem Eskinazi “Honest and slightly uncomfortable” typographic & pictorial experiences by the type and graphic designer RISD GD MFA alum
Europa (Mia Frostner and Robert Sollis) Anglo-Swedish urban/cultural infrastructure aesthetics
Farah Fayyad Beirut-based Arabic alphabet brilliance
Remeike Forbes Radical leftist design and creative direction of the socialist magazine Jacobin by the RISD GD MFA alum
Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab Khartoum, Sudan-born ex-Chicago, newly Providence-based graphic designer, educator, and publisher working critically with such typographic fundamentals as language, form, and the human condition
Lemi Ghariokwu The acclaimed African album art auteur from Lagos, known for his exuberant artwork for Afrobeat maestro Fela Kuti spanning the 1970s through the ’90s (see also “A Dynasty of Album Cover Art,” personal account by Lemi in a 2013 issue of British literary journal Granta)
Gran Fury The “propaganda wing” of the early AIDS-awareness movement
Graphic Thought Facility Inventive British high-culture low-tech graphic design boffins
April Greiman Radical LA new wave photo/graphic pioneer
Catherine Griffiths New Zealand typographer working with voids, vowels, and other interventions in public space
Lauren Grusenmeyer Boisterous beaux arts from the bold Belgian bureau
Guerrilla Girls Feminist activist artists using facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose gender, ethnic bias, and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture
Geoff Han Articulate and fresh expressions of art and architecture through quietly experimental processes and printing
Jerome Harris MICA-based graphic designer, educator, writer, and curator: recent work includes the fantastic As, Not For: Dethroning Our Absolutes exhibition, which addresses the absence of African-American graphic designers in design history and education
Kazunari Hattori Loose and spirited art direction of magazines, photography, books, and advertising by the Tokyo-based designer
Keiko Hirano Japanese art director notable for her subtle identity and packaging work
Lucinda Hitchcock You know her as a certain prominent RISD professor, you should also know her as an ace book designer, typographer, language shape shifter, and fantastical Ffabschrifter extraordinaire
Jenny Holzer Artist using words and language as her primary medium, known for her text-as-image Truisms
Eric Hu Art director and graphic designer, ex-Ssense Creative Director, ex-Global Design Director on Sportswear at Nike, publisher of Talk, designer of Mold
Kim Ihre Swedish graphic designer, art director, and photographer whose work addresses such topics as sisterhood, the female body, and sensuality
Norman Ives Typographic forms and counterforms in paint, collage, bas-relief and murals
Barbara Jones-Hogu Vibrant, politically-charged graphic and typographic screen prints by the recently-passed Chicago-based artist, filmmaker, and teacher, founding member of the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (AfriCOBRA) and central figure of the Black Arts Movement
E Roon Kang Typographic multifunctionality and flow from the NYC-based polymath Math Practice studio founder
Susan Kare Artist and graphic designer known for her design of interface elements and typefaces for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s
Jon Key Art director, designer, and writer; RISD BFA GD grad; one half of Morcos Key; and co-founder/Design Director at Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating, producing, supporting, and showcasing work by artists of color, particularly women, queer, and trans artists of color. Among other things!
Katharina Köhler German graphic and type designer, AKA Ktell, co-founder of type collective Camelot
Barbara Kruger Bold typographic critiques of consumerism and desire influenced by the artist’s early work as a graphic designer
Hyo Kwon Wry typographic translations of art and culture by the New York-based designer
Indra Kupferschmid Peripatetic encyclopedic German typographer and teacher
Masakazu Kitayama Under-the-radar Japanese art director producing over-the-top music graphics
Minkyoung Kim Cross-media artist and designer (and RISD GD faculty!) working with visual digital & print systems involving repetition and evolution
Na Kim Vibrant type, colours, images, patterns from the Stuttgart-based Korean designer
Joris Kritis Studious, droll publication design from Brussels
Kerry Ann Lee Artist, designer, teacher, writer, publisher from Te Whanganui-a-tara (Wellington), Aotearoa (New Zealand) working with installation, print and image, known for her work with self-published fanzines over the past two decades under the Red Letter Distro guise, an international punk rock mail-order catalogue-cum-‘occasional distro’ of curated zines, comics and artist publications.
Glenn Ligon Forceful typographic examinations of American cultural and social identity through words, paint, and light
Tracy Ma Ex-Bloomberg Businessweek graphic designer whose work explores “as many codes of visual culture as possible”
Kerry James Marshall Mastrful lettering and type found woven through the American master’s paintings that depict actual and imagined events from African-American history
MGMT. New York-based studio run by designers Alicia Cheng and Sarah Gephart (frequently joined by RISD BFA and MFA alums like Federico Pérez Villoro, Olivia de Salve Villedieu, and Ji Eun Kim among many others), specialising in the intelligent, accessible, engaging, and subtly humourous presentation of information, from rotational grazing to international migrant populations
Tomoko Miho Japanese-American graphic designer known for her applications of spatial solutions to printed matter
Reid Miles Seminal Blue Note Records jazz typographic acrobatics
Wael Morcos Graphic and type designer from Beirut, Lebanon, other half of of Morcos Key, RISD GD MFA grad, Arabic-Latin bilingual typeface specialist, alongside work in print and exhibition design
Fraser Muggeridge Off-the-wall and off-the-shelf typography from London, founder of Typography Summer School
Nontsikelelo Mutiti Zimbabwean-born artist, designer, and teacher traversing the boundaries of fine art, design, and public engagement
Poly-Mode LA-based studio founded by designer, writer, and Otis teacher Silas Munro, working on arts, non-profit, and government projects with partner (and RISD alum) Brian Johnson
Rumors Portland studio producing visual identities and websites for cultural, commercial, and editorial groups run by Andy Pressman (who is also art director of left-wing London/NY publishers Verso)
Skolos Wedell RISD GD faculty colleagues whose work connects photography, typography, and two– and three-dimensional spaces
Martine Syms LA-based American artist and self-described “conceptual entrepreneur” working in publishing, video, and performance
Morag Myerscough Explosive site-specific installation graphics, informed by Morag’s mantra: “make happy those who are near and those who are far will come”
Karl Nawrot Abstract multidimensional graphic compositions from the Paris-based designer
Shiva Nallaperumal Research-led process-driven Indian graphic designer, type designer, and illustrator
Sandrine Nugue Audacious French type design and typography loaded with history and narrative
Min Oh Amsterdam-based Korean ex-pianist artist, director, and designer working in time and space
OK-RM Ollie and Rory’s precise yet human graphic design thoughtfully applied across paper, screen, and city
O.OO Taipei-based glyphic chromatic typographic acrobatic experiments in offset and Riso production processes
Other Means Deadpan dialectics delivered through design documents from deepest Gowanus
Mark Owens Critical pop and popular criticism oscillating between LA, Philadelphia, and New York
Allison Parrish Computer programmer, poet, educator, and game designer investigating the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet
Harsh Patel Symbols, signs, segments, and spirits made manifest in enigmatic art, design, and mini-press publishing from LA
Julie Peeters Effortless editorial and publication design by the Belgian designer and Bill magazine editor
Cipe Pineles The pioneering mid-20th century female art director known for her still-fresh approaches at Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle
Nejc Prah Serious Slovenian typographic assemblage
Pref Multilayered 3-d graffiti phrasing by the British street artist
Queertype Social t-shirt project by Minna Sakaria (see below) merging typography with queer theory
Hassan Rahim Monumental musical monoliths by the New York-based artist, designer, art director from LA
The Rodina Tereza and Vit Ruller’s performative communication direct actions
Kay Rosen Text-based American painter’s meditations on language and perception, by turns witty, whimsical, moving, and incisively political
David Rudnick British-born American-raised ultrarealist compositions
Ed Ruscha Monumental everyday typographic landscapes
Minna Sakaria Spirited Stockholm-based letters and shapes
Elana Schlenker Philadelphia multidisciplinary graphic designer, publisher of Gratuitous Type, and proprietor of Less Than 100, a traveling pop up shop dedicated to achieving gender wage parity
Slavs and Tatars Art collective and “faction of polemics and intimacies,” initially started as a reading group, now prolific publishers and exhibitors exploring popular culture, spiritual traditions, oral histories, and modern myths
Barbara Stauffacher Solomon San Francisco landscape architect, graphic designer, and Sea Ranch supergraphics spearhead
Hito Steyerl German cultural critic, filmmaker, visual artist, writer, and essay documentarian
Sulki & Min Bilingual typographic dexterity by the Seoul-based graphic design and publishing couple, informed by their unbeatable studio motto: “Clarifying is our business, obscuring is our pleasure”
Deborah Sussman Exhilarating environmental graphics and architecture from the late LA ace
Tézzo Suzuki Eclectic and exuberant typographically-driven ephemera (with admirable and enlightening expository process and influences for each project) by the Tokyo-based KABK Type and Media graduate
Kia Tasbihgou London-based graphic and type design, founder of the newly-launched Op. Cit. Ibid foundry
Ramon Tejada Independent Dominican-American designer (and of course RISD GD faculty) challenging and countering myriad received wisdoms regarding “traditional” Western design paradigms with his vibrant persuasive (typo)graphic works, writing, and speaking
Rosmarie Tissi Seminal Zürich-based Swiss serigraph savant
Edward Wright British 1950s–60s artist, designer, teacher whose work traversed scales from logo to architecture
Can Yang RISD BFA (and freshly graduated) RCA alum with masterful Chinese and Latin typographic dexterity evolving into her RCA thesis-defined “NeoBridge” theory: “?????????. (α иєσвяι∂gє иєνєя яєѕтяι¢тѕ тнє ραѕѕαgєѕ ву мαяgιиѕ σя вσя∂єяѕ; α иєσвяι∂gє σνєяяυиѕ ∂ιѕρєяѕινєℓу, тнєяє ιѕ иσ єи∂ σf ѕυ¢н gαтєωαу αѕ тнє єи∂ σf σиє ѕι∂є ιѕ αℓωαуѕ тнє ѕтαят σf тнє σтнєя; α иєσвяι∂gє ιѕ иσт σиℓу α ℓιикαgє вєтωєєи тωσ тєямιиαтισиѕ, ιт ιѕ α иєтωσяк σf σтнєя иєσвяι∂gєѕ, fяσм ωнι¢н ιт ∂ιffєяѕ.)”
Mary Yang Lyrical visual languages conducted by the RISD MFA alum graphic designer and teacher (Boston U)
YES Subtly conceptual materially-inventive London-based art direction, design, and technology studio
Qing Zhao Radical Chinese art, typography, design, prints, and books

Some Reading

Computation/Technology
Dexter Sinister, “Letter & Spirit,” Bulletins of the Serving Library #3, 2012 (See also video edition)
Florian Hardwig, Thomas Maier, “From Lettering Guides to CNC Plotters — A Brief History of Technical Lettering Tools,” Typotheque, 15 January 2017
Christoph Knoth, “Computed Type Design,” (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie, 2012). Christoph’s impressive Masters thesis on the history and contemporary state of computerised type design process and the potential for parametrical type.
Jürg Lehni, “Typeface As Programme,” Typotheque, 14 April 2011 (Originally published in Typeface as Program (Lausanne: ÉCAL and Geneva: JRP Ringier, 2009) Artist / designer / programmer Jürg Lehni analyses the evolution of typographic technology and the nature of digital fonts.
Paul McCann, “A Spectre is Haunting Unicode,” Dampfkraft, July 29, 2018. After Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding known as the JIS X 0208 standard, people noticed something strange. Several of the added characters had no obvious sources and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. They were … (whisper ominously) “ghost characters!”
Mindy Seu, “Case Study: The Poetry of Tools,” Are.na Blog, August 10, 2017
Nick Sherman, “The Future of Responsive Typography,” An Event Apart Seattle, March 31, 2014
Loretta Staples, “Typography & the Screen: A Technical Chronology of Digital Typography, 1984–1997,” Design Issues Vol. 16, No. 3 Autumn (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000) Text Version | PDF Original Excellent survey of the ongoing “mutation of letters” observed and documented during the early phase of digital evolution during the ’80s and ’90s by half-Black, half-Japanese (and RISD alum!) user interface pioneer Loretta Staples (See link below under “Herstory/History” for a great 2021 NYT profile) Thanks to comrade Ramon Tejada for this reference!
Klaus Zhang, “The Pulsar: A Revolution in Display Technology,” The Pennsylvania Center for the Book, Fall 2010
Context/Culture
Tauba Auerbach, “(P)(E)(R)(S)(E)(V)(E)(R)(E),” Bulletins of the Serving Library, May 20, 2017
Yasmin Belkhyr, “Can public art inspire productive political conversations?,” ideas.ted.com, 4 July 2019 Survey of recent projects where artists use photography, and typography, to take over highway billboards with provocative political and social questions & statements
Matthew Bird, Brockett Horne, Jennifer Kaufmann-Buhler, Gretchen Von Koenig, Bess Williamson, Victoria Rose Pass, Sara Reed, et al, Decentering Whiteness in Design History Resources, 2020–ongoing
Michèle Champagne, “Handwriting in an Era of Glitter Text Generators,” The Gradient, Walker Art Center, July 18, 2017
Madeleine Chapman (dir.), “The typeface that told the stories of Chinese New Zealanders,” Objectspace, 4 May 2021 (YouTube) Fantastic short film about Chinese Aotearoa (New Zealand) history, the New Zealand Chinese Growers’ Monthly Journal, and a literal ton of lead type. See also Kerry Ann Lee and Emma Ng below for more perspectives on this remarkable story
Jesse Chun, “On lunar colonization and ‘unlanguaging’ empire,” Artforum, Sept 9, 2020 As Artforum says in the intro here, New York artist Jesse Chun “manipulates the tools of English-language pedagogy and officialdom to expose the linguistic imperialism of this so-called common tongue. In the past, she has used children’s alphabet toys as molds for silicone and graphite sculptures, creating abstract, illegible forms.”
Sarah Gephart, “Hypothetical Hack,” Digressions, MGMT, 2018. An iOS glitch inspires an exploration into how type represents gender and why. (See also: Angela Riechers, “MGMT.’s Hypothetical, Typographical Hack on Gendered Pronouns,” AIGA Eye on Design, July 16, 2018)
Tatiana Gómez, “‘I Will Not Act in the World Before Understanding the World’: A Conversation with Alfredo Jaar,” v.1, 2018 RISD GD MFA alum Tatiana Gómez interviews Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar (known for his provocative 1987 Times Square screen-based work A Logo for America) about ambiguity, clarity, and the artist’s responsibility in the world
Steven Heller, “Marking in L.A.: An Interview with François Chastanet,” AIGA, November 18, 2009 Interview about Latinx cholo graffiti and letterforms in Los Angeles with the author of (sadly long out of print) Cholo Writing: Latino Gang Graffiti in Los Angeles.
Sojin Kim + Somi Kim, “Typecast: Meaning, Culture, and Identity in the Alphabet Omelette (¿Which Came First?),” Lift and Separate: Graphic Design and the Vernacular (New York: Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, 1993)
Kerry Ann Lee, “Heavy metal afterlives: A sideways appreciation of the NZ Chinese Growers Monthly typeface,” The Spinoff, May 6, 2021 Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington)-based artist, designer, teacher, publisher Kerry Ann Lee looks at the enduring appeal of Chinese typeface and letterpress design in the digital age. See also Emma Ng, just below.
Madeleine Morley, “The Women Redressing the Gender Imbalance in Typography,” AIGA Eye on Design, September 28, 2016
Silas Munro, “Typography as a Radical Act in an Industry Ever-dominated by White Men,” AIGA Eye on Design, August 22, 2019. LA-based designer, writer, and Otis teacher Silas Munro profiles DC-area Maryland-based designer Tré Seals and his radical foundry Vocal Type.
Emma Ng, “The Single Object: A metric tonne of Chinese-New Zealand history,” Objectspace Journal, September 17, 2018. New Zealand curator & writer Emma Ng examines the once-lost Chinese typeface used to print the New Zealand Chinese Growers’ Monthly Journal.
Other Means, “Ronald McDonald Ollie Dos & Don’ts: What Mascots Can Teach Us About Branding,” The Gradient, Walker Art Center, June 21, 2017
Mark Owens, “A Note on the Type,” Shannon Ebner, Auto Body Collision (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2015)
Andrew Sondern, “How Do You Print Out the Entire Internet?,” New York Times, April 6, 2019
Jon Sueda, Christopher Hamamoto, Federico Pérez Villoro, “Subversive Guidelines: On the Evolving Landscape of Visual Identity Design,” The Gradient, Walker Art Center, September 28, 2018
John Converse Townsend, “This Native American Artist’s Street Art Reminds L.A. Residents Who Was There First,” Fast Company, August 24, 2016 Brief profile of Native American artist and self-described “professional vandal” Jaque Fragua and his 2016 downtown LA urban lettering actions.
Dynamic Text Environments
Tim Brown, Flexible Typesetting (New York: A Book Apart, 2018). Because of the web, the role of the typographer has changed: what happens when we can no longer predict how, and where, our typography will be read?
Frank Chimero, “What Screens Want,” Lecture, Build conference, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 14 Nov 2013 Brilliant analysis of design evolving for screens, especially on the “grain” of screens and various levels of “flux” that we might consider part of a kinetic typographic vocabulary for motion design and UI/UX functionality
Geoff Graham, “Methods for Controlling Spacing in Web Typography,” CSS-Tricks, Sep 26, 2016
Indra Kupferschmid, “Typography on the Web,” Kupferschrift, 19 Feb 2015
Indra Kupferschmid, “Using Type in the Digital Realm,” Typographics conference, New York, 2016
Andrew Sondern, “How Do You Print Out the Entire Internet?,” New York Times, April 6, 2019
Herstory/History
Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Britt Rusert (eds.), W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018) Sociologist and Black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois’s prophetic infographics charting the turn of the century Black experience, presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. This crucial publication includes contributions from Silas Munro (see the “Typographers” list on this page), Aldon Morris, and Mabel O. Wilson. Watch this excellent Letterform Archive talk by Silas Munro where he takes you through a Du Boisian “meal” of time and space.
Dina Benbrahim, “What does a feminist graphic design history in the United States look like?,” Alphabettes, Mar 1, 2020 A forceful survey of artifacts designed by women from a feminist perspective as a counterpoint to white male dominance in design history: a 4-part series by Arab multidisciplinary creative Dina Benbrahim.
Alicia Yin Cheng, “This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A brief history of the printed ballot,” New Yorker, 5 November 2018 An overview of (RISD thesis critic, erstwhile partner of New York design studio MGMT., now Head of Design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) Alicia Cheng’s major research into the unsurprisingly inconsistent and surprisingly typographically radical history of US election ballots, precursor to Alicia’s final published project (see below).
Alicia Yin Cheng, This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot (Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2020) Following the New Yorker piece (above), Alicia’s final published research constitutes the first illustrated history of printed ballot design, in all its outlandish, illogical, and illegible glory.
Erica DiBenedetto, “A Digital Platform Activates Frédéric Bruly Bouabré’s Universal Alphabet,” MoMA, Mar 22, 2022 In the 1950s artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré was working a government job in Dakar, the capital of what was then French West Africa, when he decided to devise a way to write his native Bété language, from a predominantly oral culture, using the phonetic structure of the language. It was a project astonishing in scope, leading to over 400 characters, each schematically depicting activities and things from everyday life. Decades later, Bouabré further developed the imagery in those glyphs into the monumental artwork Alphabet Bété, which comprises detailed drawings of the subject matter referenced in each of the glyphs. See also: the Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound MoMA exhibition website, as well as this great intro video about the project by curator Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi.
Nika Simovich Fisher, “A Pioneer of Digital Design Looks Back on a Defining Era,” New York Times, 18 March 2021 “Men, especially ones named Steve and Bill, get a lot of credit for heralding this modern era of information technology. But behind the scenes, at tech and design firms around the world, the look and feel of those screens was defined by lesser-known graphic designers…” Great profile of half-Black, half-Japanese (and RISD alum!) user interface pioneer Loretta Staples (see also links to “Typography & the Screen,” her excellent essay on the evolution of digital typography in the ’80s and ’90s, above in the “Computation/Technology” category)
Florence Fu, “From the Collection: Laini (Sylvia Abernathy),” Letterform Archive, March 19, 2019. The Chicago-based activist’s dynamic album covers of the 1960s expand our sense of design history.
Robin Kinross, Modern typography: an essay in critical history (London: Hyphen Press, 1992; new edition, Paris: Éditions B42, 2019) A contextual and social history of Western typography that defines “modern” as c.1700 to late 20th century. See the sample pages linked here, currently out of print, but a new edition has just been released by Paris-based Éditions B42.
Saki Mafundikwa, Afrikan Alphabets: The Story of Writing in Afrika (Brooklyn: Mark Batty Publisher, 2006) Long out of print, but available in the RISD library and well worth checking out: a comprehensive review of African writing systems spanning centuries including Adinkra, Mende, Vai, Nsibidi, Bamum, Somali, and Ethiopian scripts. Saki Mafundikwa left a successful design career in New York to return to Africa and start Zimbabwe‘s first graphic design and new media school. I love the double meaning of Saki’s favorite Ghanaian glyph, Sankofa, which means “return and get it,” or “learn from the past.”
MMS (Maryam Fanni, Matilda Flodmark, Sara Kaaman) (eds.), The Natural Enemies of Books: A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography (Ghent: Occasional Papers, 2020) Edited by Swedish feminist graphic design collective MMS, this fantastic anthology highlights the print industry’s inequalities and proposes a takeover of the history of the book. See a brief video flick-through of the book by Briar Levit.
Language/Poetics/Theory
Johanna Drucker, Diagrammatic Writing (Santa Monica: RAM Publications, 2013)
Gerrit Noordzij, The Stroke: Theory of Writing (London: Hyphen Press, 2005)
Federico Pérez Villoro, “Here are Letters,” in Pérez Villoro, Nic Schumann (eds.), Latent Space: Notes on Seeing Letters Like a Machine (Mexico City: Gato Negro Ediciones, 2019) RISD GD MFA Alum Federico charts language, representation, and geography in this introduction to a fantastic book that analyses the underlying processes of machine learning by training an algorithm to analyse formal patterns of the alphabet.
Type
Florence Fu, “From the Collection: Ahn Sang Soo and AG Typography Institute,” Letterform Archive, May 1, 2019. Dating back to 1985, specimens of Ahn’s digital type represent the origins of exploration and play found in Hangul design today.
Rob Giampietro, “Fonts of the Resistance: Designing Redaction,” MoMA Magazine, 18 April 2019 Interview by (now ex-MoMa Design Director) Rob Giampietro with Forest Young (designer & Global Principal of Wolff Olins) and type designer Jeremy Mickel (founder of the LA-based type foundry MCKL) about their work on the (free and open access) typeface for Redaction, a collaborative project by visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and memoirist, poet, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts at MoMA PS1
Bo-Won Keum, “On the Letterform of the Age,” Triple Canopy, February 4, 2021 An excellent illustrated critical analysis of the role of the designer in balancing program and expression and system and sense, by ace Brooklyn-based designer, MIT lecturer, and RISD GD MFA alum Bo-Won Keum
David Jonathan Ross, “We Are Family! I’ve Got All My Variations With Me,” Type@Cooper, 2017. A good primer on the historical context and contemporary state of the relatively new OpenType variable font format.
Nick Sherman, “Variable Fonts for Responsive Design,” A List Apart, January 23, 2015
Liron Lavi Turkenich, “Expanding on Infini, with Sandrine Nugue,” Alphabettes, March 22, 2018
Typography
Lena Groeger, “How Typography Can Save Your Life,” Source, May 11, 2016
Jost Hochuli, Detail in typography (London: Hyphen Press, 2008; reprinted Paris: Editions B42, 2015). Highly recommended reference guide to typographic principles and basics by the Swiss book design maestro: a slimmer, far more succinct, counterpart to Bringhurst.
John Kane, A Type Primer (London: Laurence King, 2003/2011)
Robin Kinross, Modern Typography (Chapters 1–3) (London: Hyphen Press, 1992)
Robin Kinross, “More Light!: For a typography that knows what it’s doing,” 1993
Ellen Lupton, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004)
Bruno Munari, “The Shape of Words” & “Poems and Telegrams,” Design as Art (London: Pelican, 1971)
Elana Schlenker (editor), Gratuitous Type magazine. Just a general link and shoutout to Elana and her fantastic zine or, as she puts it, “occasional pamphlet of typographic smut.”
Punctuation
Daisy Alioto, “Ode to the Dinkus,” The Paris Review, June 8, 2018. An exploration and celebration of asterisks, asterisms, fleurons, zarebas, ornaments, dingbats, and, indeed, dinkuses.
Victor Borge, “Phonetic Punctuation,” The Ed Sullivan Show, CBS, June 12, 1960
Pico Iyer, “In Praise of the Humble Comma,” Time, June 24, 2001
Stencils
Eric Kindel, “A tradition with breaks”, Eye 86, Autumn 2013
Eric Kindel, “Between Writing & Type: the Stencil Letter”, in Kindel, Fred Smeijers (eds.) Between Writing & Type: the Stencil Letter (Antwerp: Our Type/Catapult, 2012). See also Eric Kindel, “Type Tuesday: Between writing & type,” Eye Blog, 15 May 2012
John Morgan, “Common ground: a designer’s letter from Venice”, Eye Blog, 1 November 2012
Ferdinand Ulrich, “Stencil alphabets: Interrupted strokes and divided shapes,” FontShop Blog, March 09, 2016

Some Type, Type Designers, Foundries, &c.

205 TF Lyon-based Typographie Française, a foundry gathering typefaces by a number of independent French designers both established and just starting out
AG Typography Institute (Ahn Sang-Soo) Often referred to as “the father of contemporary Korean type design,” Ahn Sang-Soo is behind a revolutionary transition of traditional Hangul (the Korean alphabet) to the digital realm. Read this Letterform Archive profileby Florence Fu on Ahn’s digital type specimens
A is for Apple The nom de plume of Paris-based type designer Émilie Rigaud, producing type that “brings together the craziness of graphic design and the expertise of typeface design”
Simoul Alva Bold, fluid type and images from Mumbai via Paris, Moscow, Abu Dhabi, and New York
Black Type Designers & Foundry Owners A database of Black type designers initiated by Fresh Fonts and Typographica
Bold Decisions
Bold Monday
Bureau Brut French trio typographique’s brutal type shop
Camelot
Carvalho Bernau Netherlands-based graphic & type design Portuguese/German dynamic duo Susana Carvalho and Kai Bernau
Cat Fonts Achtung! Die schleichen sich ein!
Nadine Chahine
Colophon Foundry
Commercial Type
Dinamo
Emigre
Michael Everson World writing systems expert, active supporter of character standardization and internationalization for minority-language communities, designer of Everson Mono, a shareware lightweight monospaced font that supports an extremely wide range of Unicode characters. Free download, worth supporting if you can spare €25
Forgotten Shapes Faithful digital reconstructions of typefaces that have somehow disappeared from use
Frere Jones
Future Fonts A new marketplace for typefaces in progress, providing a way to gain access to interesting typographic styles sooner, and to help fund the long process undertaken by type designers
Sibylle Hagman AKA Kontour
Berton Hasebe
Heavyweight Prague-based foundry currently offering a full download of work-in-progress beta fonts
Cyrus Highsmith (Occupant Fonts) Providence-based typeface designer, illustrator, and author, now founder and Creative Director of the Morisawa Providence Drawing Office in partnership with the Japanese mega type corporation
Hungarumlaut
Indian Type Foundry
Infini A so-called “axe-cut” by French designer Sandrine Nugue from a public commission by the Centre national des arts plastiques (France), released for free under Creative Commons licence
Klim Type Foundry Rigorous alphabet awesomeness from Aotearoa, care of contemporary character craftsman Kris Sowersby
Noheul Lee Korean-born, Switzerland-based Hangul & Latin multi-script type designer and a partner of ‘lo-ol typefoundry’; graduate of the Type and Media program at KABK, The Hague; designer of new Hangul and Latin character Future Fonts release Arvana
Letters from Sweden
Zuzana Licko (Emigre)
Lineto Seminal Swiss type foundry founded by Cornel Windlin and Stephan “Pronto” Müller, featuring type designed by those two along with Laurenz Brunner, NORM, Team ’77, Aurèle Sack, and (full disclosure) a certain RISD Typography III professor
Wael Morcos (See also listing above under “Typographers”) Graphic and type designer from Beirut, Lebanon, other half of of Morcos Key, RISD GD MFA grad, Arabic-Latin bilingual typeface specialist, alongside work in print and exhibition design
Morisawa
Sandrine Nugue Read this great article about Sandrine’s aforementioned Infini type
Oh No Type Co. AKA James “Fonts are Chill” Edmondson
Op. Cit. Ibid.
Optimo
Inga Plönnigs
Redaction A (free, open access) typeface by Forest Young (designer & Global Principal of Wolff Olins) and Jeremy Mickel (founder of LA-based type foundry MCKL) with weights ranging from legible to obscure, designed specifically for a collaborative MoMA PS1 project of the same name where visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and memoirist, poet, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts highlighted stark injustices in our present-day judicial system
Victoria Rushton
June Shin New York-based RISD GD MFA alum, Occupant Fonts-based type designer, independent graphic designer, and incredible RISD GD adjunct professor June! Her newly released typeface Rapport is my new favourite sans. Read her report of her type design research and process for Rapport on Occupant’s site.
Nina Stössinger
Typequality A wonderful database of typefaces designed by women
Typotheque
Underware
Use & Modify A collection of “beautiful, classy, punk, professional, incomplete, weird” open source-licensed fonts that are free to use and modify, personally selected by Paris-based digital artist and teacher Raphaël Bastide.
Vocal Type In founder Tré Seals’s words, “This is a type foundry for creatives of color who feel that they don’t have a say in their industry. This is for the creative women who feel that they don’t have a say in their industry. This is for the creative that is tired of being ‘inspired’ by the same designs over and over again.”
Work Sans Nine-weight family by Chinese-Australian type designer Wei Huang, loosely based on early Grotesques and released under a free open source licence (use it at Google Fonts, follow it on GitHub)

Some Resources

A-B-Z-TXT A decentralised school for 21st century typography, convening every year in Toronto, founded by Michèle Champagne, Garry Ing, and Greg J. Smith
“A guide to digital design at the Guardian,” The Guardian, 2018 Impressive in-house design guide for the British newspaper, with good examples of responsive grid structures, modular editorial cards, typographic hierarchies, colour, and graphic elements, all providing a good example of digital editorial design in itself
Axis-Praxis One of the first Variable Fonts resources
Get Emoji Emojis are typography too. Copy/paste resource
Google Fonts Korean Mighty morphing monochrome mini-site for Google’s collection of Korean fonts, designed by E Roon Kang at Math Practice
Scott Kellum and Tim Brown, Modular Scale Modular typographic scale for setting body and heading ratios (and testing type sizes in the browser)
Letterform Archive San Francisco-based non-profit centre containing a curated collection of over 40,000 items related to lettering, typography, calligraphy, and graphic design, spanning thousands of years of history
Rob Stinogle and Lauren Gray, “Inspect Element on Devices,” robandlauren.com, 2013 Use these instructions for using your Mac in Safari or Chrome to inspect and adjust CSS and typographic elements on any website and view changes on your mobile iOS or Android device
The Type Chinese typography and design media collective edited by Peiran Tan
Type Crit Crew A great free resource for type design students to meet 1–1 with experienced type designers for virtual critiques
TypeMedia: MA in Type Design at the KABK The small yet highly influential type design masters program at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague. See the always-impressive exam project microsites showcasing graduating students work, listed by year at the base of their page
Typographica In-depth reviews of typefaces and type books, with occasional commentary on fonts and typographic design. Edited by Stephen Coles with Caren Litherland, designed by RISD GD MFA alum Chris Hamamoto
Typography Summer School Annual London and New York meeting place for graduates of graphic design bridging the gap between student and professional practice
V-Fonts A bendy, stretchy Variable Type resource