Tag: type design

Inclusive Characters: Merging Aesthetics and Accessibility in Type Design

Typefaces that prioritize disability concerns to reduce barriers to equitable access for written material.

Katie Krcmarik
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), vision disabilities rank among the top 10 most common disabilities in the United States. The World Health Organization reports that approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide experience some form of vision impairment. With an aging population, the prevalence of vision-related disabilities is expected to rise. Additionally, learning disabilities affecting reading have a significant societal impact, with the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity estimating that approximately 20% of the population experiences dyslexia. Given the number of people affected by some form of vision-related disability, communication design, especially type design, must respond by developing and utilizing typefaces that prioritize disability concerns to reduce barriers to equitable access for written material.

The history of type design often focuses on aesthetics and form, with readability and legibility viewed more through the lens of reproduction and technology. Historically, type designers demonstrated no concerted effort to explore accessibility meaningfully, and even now that we understand accessibility, few center these concerns. Instead, typography functions similarly to an outdated structure needing retrofitting, using legibility testing for typefaces to determine if they meet accessibility standards. Just as retrofitting buildings for accessibility often fails to meet the needs of disabled individuals fully, using typefaces designed without considering accessibility fails to meet the needs of those with reading and vision disabilities.

Despite its ableist history, the field of type design shows promising signs of change. This presentation will explore three typefaces—Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Luciole—demonstrating the potential of centering disability needs in developing a typeface without sacrificing aesthetic concerns. The emergence of such typefaces is a beacon of hope, signaling a potential future where collaboration with the disabled community can integrate accessibility without sacrificing aesthetics, challenging misconceptions about accessible design, and paving the way to expand accessibility practices in design.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.3: Virtual Summer on Friday, June 20, 2025.

Federico: Embracing Outside Influences

A typeface modeled after the sign making practice of a solitary World War II veteran

Kyla Paolucci
Assistant Professor
St John’s University

Federico is a typeface modeled after the sign making practice of my grandfather, a solitary World War II vet who drafted his progressive philosophies in electrical tape for all those who passed his home. His practice employed humble materials to create hopeful messages despite his own economic poverty. I’ve recreated his methods with the tools readily available to me to design a spirited typeface that features a range of styles.

As a graphic designer and educator, I am intrigued by how ethnographic approaches to design can enrich commercial outcomes. By refocusing type design on analog practices, the materials used when creating work can reflect relational experiences and unveil new visual languages for future applications. Tape is an inexpensive material that is admired by many designers and my use is one of many recipes. Its properties enable diverse constructions across various contexts. As a tool for type design, characters are engineered rather than drawn, allowing for quick reconfiguration and expansion of weights and styles.

Type design has become more accessible over the years with free software and online instruction. Federico, however, is an analog process that must leverage desktop tools to exist in a predominantly digital market. Serving not only as a typeface, Federico is a system that connects me to my generational roots as a designer by embracing traditional methods while adapting to modern tools and technologies.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 10.3: Tenth Anniversary, St. John’s University (Hybrid) on Friday, June 7, 2024.

Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters

The College for Creative Studies / BFA Communication Design department began a partnership with The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation’s Curators and Archivist

Susan LaPorte
Professor
College for Creative Studies

Communication Design and typography have been intertwined from the start, as the urge to express moved from the oral to the written, so has this partnership. Consider the enterprising graphic marks pressed into clay to communicate commerce by Sumerians, hieroglyphs documenting Egyptian rituals, the innovation of movable type first in the east, and then the west, to the typographic alphabet soup from the industry period, and ones/zeros that continue to document our thoughts through the words we write and the typographic expressions we employ to amplify their messages. The shape that typography has taken reflects the taste(s), technology(s), and need(s) of global citizens through time.

The College for Creative Studies / BFA Communication Design department began a partnership with The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation’s Curators and Archivists. The class was given their vast collections of objects and artifacts as a starting point for their type design inquiry. Each student documented typography/or graphic marks found or embedded within carriages, signage, broadside, machinery, games, as inspiration for a new typeface that expanded the sample and inspired new alphabet of their own vision. Additionally, the goal was for students to see the importance of research around a design can broaden their design practice; that design is not always about serving a client, but also expanding knowledge around our discipline.

A typographic history lecture was shared to broaden their understanding of type, written communication, and the technology that shaped information through the centuries. Students then focused their own critical research, to discover greater relevance of context and meaning to the design of their type specimens. The process of creating were iterative, critical, and resulted expanding the students understanding of design practice and original type designs inspired from the collection.

The results of this class and our partnership with the HFM, and with the financial support of the Ford Fund are a set of publications, entitled Gadzooks: An Embellished Connection Between Like-Minded Characters. It is a documentation of 13 new typefaces, designed by 13 new type designers, expanding our typographic legacy.

This design research was presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 9.1: Kent State University on Saturday, October 15, 2022.

Redefining The Default: Decentering Pedagogical Perspective in the Typography Classroom

Educators need diverse representation in course materials—students must feel seen in order to truly succeed.

Mia Culbertson
Assistant Professor
Kutztown University

Typography is central to design, yet the standard curriculum centers around Western, able-bodied, straight, white, and male figures, frequently misrepresenting or excluding marginalized communities. In educational and professional spaces, this can have harmful effects on BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled designer and student communities. Creating a typography classroom that prioritizes equitable representation will avoid alienating minority student communities and reduce stereotyping through uninformed design decisions.

There has been a recent push in our discipline to decenter and decolonize our curriculum with the publication of resources like Decentering Whiteness in Design History Resources (Pass et al., 2020) and Extra Bold (Lupton et al., 2021); in this presentation I will discuss the importance of doing so specifically within the realm of typography. As the visual preservation of language, typography can be intricate, particularly when positioned within the larger context of world history. As often seen in other fields, minority communities’ contributions are often excluded from the canon despite frequently serving as the foundation on which Western designers expanded on; for example, facets of typography in the Belgian Art Nouveau movement can be linked to traditional Congolese motifs.  

To send emerging designers out into the world who truly understand the cultural nuances of typography and creating with rather than for communities, educators need diverse representation in course materials—students must feel seen in order to truly succeed. Teaching non-Latin communications such as the ancient Vai syllabary and introducing designers from marginalized communities like Angel DeCora empowers students and ensures these significant contributions to the development of typography are not forgotten or “othered”; it also helps ensure students’ broad perspective and historical context as they develop their own typographic practices, avoiding stereotypes and appropriation in design. Decentering pedagogical perspective in the typography classroom has widespread implications for marginalized student communities and our discipline at large.

The Machine Hand

Contemporary type design history of emulating hand manipulation of a brush.

Ryan Molloy
Professor
Eastern Michigan University

Single-line fonts—also known as engraving fonts, pen plotter fonts, and stick fonts—have a long history ranging from architectural hand drafting to use on pen plotters and engraving devices. As applications of digital fabrication—cnc milling, 3D printing, laser engraving, pen plotters, and craft cutters—have become more commonplace the demand for single line fonts has increased. Majority of the fonts produced and used today are outline fonts, enclosed and filled vector graphic forms. In contrast, a single-line font is composed solely of single vector lines (not enclosed). In applications of digital fabrication the use of single-fonts significantly reduces production time because machine paths are not duplicated.

Contemporary type design has long had a history of emulating the contrasting strokes created through hand manipulation of a brush. The increased demand from maker communities for single-line fonts has led to the development and commercialization of new single-line fonts or tools to convert outline fonts into single-line fonts. However, despite the traditions of type design and the movements of the machine allowing the potential to mimic traditional form of lettering most single-line fonts are designed only for a constant stroke weight. This presentation will showcase a number of personal typographic experiments and typefaces created in an attempt to find novel solutions and applications to the design of single-line fonts. From pen plotters, to engraving, to the creation of letterpress wood type, and drawing inspiration from calligraphy to graffiti the work seeks to ask how can we further reinsert the hand into digital writing.

This research was presented at the Design Incubation Colloquium 7.1: Oakland University, MI on October 17, 2020.