Tag: typography

Born Digital: Fresh Attempts around Typography Courses for Students Today

A case study of first-year type.

Jialun Wang
Assistant Professor
Otis College of Art and Design

Eager Zhang
Assistant Professor
Otis College of Art and Design

What should the first year of typography class look like in art school today, when the students sitting in the classroom grow up in the screen-dominated era? This keynote presentation unfolded a pedagogical conversation between the two presenters, across their multiple years of teaching studio typography courses at Otis College of Art and Design and other institutes. Deeply inspired by the mutation from traditional printmaking to digital display in the type and design industry, the talk shares original assignments that we found innovative and unseen previously, along with students’ outcome, to build an emerging speculative pedagogy for the fellow type educators.

The assignment sequence begins with Pushing Pixels, a hands-on, analog typography workshop that introduces the notion of “legibility” through an origin of game UI. Students are required to design legible letterforms from low-resolution to high-resolution pushing the limit of legibility and investigating the balance of mathematical structure and visual intuition. It leads to a more integrated project later in the semester: Typo-e-ology, which will yield two typographic components: a 2D “encyclopedia page” and a 3D “still life”. The project stages a critical encounter between multiple tensions of contemporary life: craftsmanship versus software, individual narratives versus consumer culture, and consciousness versus artificial intelligence.

Rooted at Otis College of Art and Design, we aim to push the boundaries of teaching typography by introducing more digital perspectives—integrating cross-reality and embodied experiences such as AR and VR—while leading workshops and lectures at institutions including NYU, USC, Harvard University, The Cooper Union, and more. Our talk invites audiences to consider key questions: How can typography be taught with an awareness of both humanity and technology? How can students be encouraged to push typography beyond flatness to engage with a rapidly accelerating world?

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.1: Virtual Online on Friday, November 14, 2025.

Mis/Understanding: Reframing Language Barriers and Miscommunication Through InteractiveDesign

An interactive installation that invites you to move and reveal layers of meaning as participants.

Najmeh Pirahmadian
Graduate student
Ohio University

Miscommunication is often studied in linguistics and psychology as a technical challenge of understanding, yet such perspectives overlook the emotional and cognitive labor carried by non-native speakers. Language barriers create hesitation, delay, and dissonance that are difficult to express through description alone. This research addresses that gap by using interactive design to reveal the invisible labor of miscommunication, reframing it from a private struggle into a shared experiential phenomenon.

The project employed an exploratory, practice-based design research methodology that combined projection mapping, creative coding, and responsive technologies to construct environments where meaning is deliberately unstable. Works include wall text where English words gradually appear over Persian letters through the viewer’s body movement, echoing the struggle of non-native speakers who must often rely on body language to make themselves understood; a dual-microphone system that distorts or delays speech; motion-activated pieces that fragment words or faces in real time; and looping animations that represent anxiety, fear of misunderstanding, and the pressure to perform fluently.

This research resonates with works such as Cildo Meireles’s Babel, which sonifies linguistic confusion; Paige (Xinling)’s Speak in Bloom, visualizing fragile digital speech; and Shuang Wu’s A Poetic Space, reinterpreting poetry beyond translation. Like these, Mis/Understanding transforms linguistic distance into shared, sensory experience.

Initial outcomes show that participants experienced stress and disorientation, suggesting the installations successfully replicate the hesitation and cognitive load of bilingual communication and make the invisible labor of miscommunication tangible.

This research contributes to communication design scholarship by reframing miscommunication as both a design problem and an opportunity: a space where interactivity and relational aesthetics generate new forms of encounter. It demonstrates how practice-based design can function as research, moving beyond representation toward experiential knowledge-making and offering transferable methods for future studies of accessibility, identity, and cross-cultural communication.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 12.1: Virtual Online on Friday, November 14, 2025.

Typography of the Transreal: N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus

It can be seen, spoken aloud, even meditated upon.

Andrew Shurtz
Assistant Professor 
Louisiana State University

N.H. Pritchard’s The Mundus, unpublished for over fifty years, is a work that is at once deeply radical and almost impossibly understated. Subtitled “a novel with voices” and described as an “exploded haiku,” it offers the viewer/reader a sequence of textual elements that gradually coalesce into language—only to fracture, detonate, and dissolve back into nothingness. A vital contribution to Black poetics, The Mundus operates on many levels: it can be seen, spoken aloud, even meditated upon. It is the ultimate exploration of what Pritchard described as the “transreal.”

The Mundus was composed through an analog process—Pritchard assembled multiple sheets of typewritten and photocopied text, collaging them together with tape. The result is a visually arresting object, where the mechanical precision of the typewriter is interrupted by the intervention of the artist’s hand. Yet its ultimate form emerges only through an act of transcoding: reinterpreting this typewritten collage as digital typography. Drawing on my experience designing and typesetting The Mundus, I will examine how this act of typographic transcoding is not just a technical process but a crucial extension of the work’s meaning—one that activates the text’s latent potential and intensifies its formal and semantic resonance.

This act of transcoding allows The Mundus to exist across multiple frameworks simultaneously. In contemporary discourse, visual communication is often framed as a dichotomy between two poles: maximalist expression versus minimalist restraint. Pritchard’s work resists this binary, offering instead a vision that holds both extremes in tension. The Mundus creates a space where presence and absence, language and silence, structure and fragmentation coexist—where nothing and everything unfold at once.

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

New Director of Peer Reviews, Chair and Director at Large

Welcoming Cat Normoyle, incoming Director of Peer Reviews, and Camila Afanador Llach as Chair, Director-at-Large

This 2024 academic year has been busy and productive at Design Incubation. We have had many activities this fall, including the Design Educators Awards, currently accepting nominations and entries until December 31, 2024. In October, we had our first fully in-person colloquium since the onset of the pandemic and our largest one to date at Boston University with four sessions and more than 20 research presentations. This year, we celebrate our 10th year with new members and ongoing development. We continue to host the series, Design Your Research Agenda (DYRA), the latest one in November. We will be publishing this episode online shortly. 

Starting this September 2024, we welcomed Cat Normoyle, Associate Professor at East Carolina University as the incoming Director of Peer Review. In spring 2025 she will be taking over this role from Camila Afanador-Llach, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, who has held the position since fall 2021. 

Normoyle is a designer, writer, and educator whose research and creative activities focus on community engagement, interactive and immersive experiences, and design pedagogy. She has a strong record of contributions to design scholarship and community engagement, evidenced by publications, presentations, and grants. Notably her writing appears in articles and book chapters published by AIGA Dialectic, Design Research Society, AIGA Design Educators Community, Routledge, and others. She is a recent grant recipient of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium for her work on the project, Our Story: The LGBTQ Stories of Eastern North Carolina, which is preparing for a fall 2025 exhibition of work. She is currently working on a book project, “Community-based Practices in Action.” We are excited to welcome her as the new Director of Peer Reviews at DI. 

Afanador-Llach has made tremendous contributions to the peer review process at DI over the last 3 years. She has further developed the peer review process, ensuring the double-blind process is objective, anonymous, rigorous, and fair and that it offers the benefits of the peer review to our members by offering feedback to all who have participated in our colloquium submission process. 

Afanador-Llach will be staying on as a Chair and Director-at-Large as she segues into other DI initiatives. We would like to thank her for her three years of service as Director of Peer Review and we are excited to be working with her in new capacities.

Afanador-Llach was promoted to tenured Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University, and is currently researching and writing about the history of graphic design in her home country Colombia. She recently completed a three-year NEH-funded project cataloging and translating metadata, developing an online resource. With her experience with metadata and from her role as DI Director of Peer Review, we hope to further the development of keyword analysis and implementation at DI.

Pedagogical Workshops and Collaboration

Engaging with dialogue, risks, intuitive creativity, and happy accidents.

Chen Luo
Lecturer
Boston University

My research is centered on pedagogical workshops and embodied publishing that encourage cultural exchange through collective practicing and community building.

I believe the pedagogical workshop as an interrogative exercise is a place where practice has no preconceived outcomes, but engages with dialogue, risks, intuitive creativity, and happy accidents. The workshops bridge making and thinking, focusing the process rather than the final results. They serve as a tool to gather individuals who want to practice together without hierarchy and institutional pressure.

The programs and writers, such as Typography Summer School, Workshop Project, Vilém Flusser, etc. inspired me to think about workshops as a place to gather discussion and craft on the need for today’s graphic design curriculum, and the relevance of typography in design history and the part it plays in today’s society. Etc. A workshop I designed with designer Chuck Gonzales, we asked students to list vocabulary related to their identity, culture, love/hate, methodology and previous work. Then they connect any two listed words into a final deliverable which is not disciplined in a certain format, but visually and sensorly engaging. The goal is to build connections among one’s beliefs and interests by considering materials, languages, performance, identity, scales, spaces at a fast pace. There are workshops that transform research into collective visual experiments. My methodology begins with trust-building exercises and instructional constraints, allowing unexpected possibilities to happen during the process. In the “Pen+Pen-Pen” workshop, hosted in multiple Art Book Fairs, Designer Bella Tuo and I made a set of creative pen tools that provide variable lengths and multiple participants to hold a pen at once. By using the pens to experiment with symmetrical typography patterns, we questioned how to create sustainable tools built upon the existing art material, and what exchange would affect in a group practice. The prompt was inspired by artist Job Wouters’ methodology.

Through transforming participants’ responsive creation into performative and installation typography through the process of writing, sharing, and moving. We explored the boundaries between bodies and language, typography and space, the individual and the communal. In “Embodied Making as Collective Publishing: The Body and Hanzi”, hosted in Boston Art Book Fair 2022. Mary Yang and I designed this workshop to explore embodied making and publishing. During this workshop, we explored the relationship between the body and Hanzi (Chinese characters) through a series of hands-on exercises to create collaborative, large-scale wearable posters. With participants who have/have no Chinese background, we proposed questions including what does collective publishing look like through collaborative labor in a shared space and time and how can this workshop create a space for cultural exchange and expression. The workshop was not only a typography experimentation, but also more lively with posing, collective moving, dancing, and photography. I have enjoyed practicing the phonetics and hieroglyphics of Hanzi through letterform writing. My aim is to create a new interplay of workshops by activating the body and traditional graphic design mediums. It fosters a sequence of processes, discourse, culture expression, and prolongs the conversation after the completion of a project.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Accessibility and Creative Authorship in Design Theory Through Multimodal Learning and Metacognitive Reflection

A course that engaged a cohort of international first-semester masters students in complex theoretical concepts encouraging self-reflection and creative authorship.

Molly Haig, Lecturer & Dr. Till Julian Huss, Professor
University of Europe for the Applied Sciences
Berlin, Germany

The study of media ecology offers design students vital insights into our culture, but like any detailed framework of ideas, these should be approached with precision, care, and scaffolding. Ecological thinking engages with the interconnectedness of complex systems, from the environment to technology and culture (Hörl 2017). Using ecological thinking as a conceptual entry point and typography as a visual one, we built a course that effectively engaged a cohort of international first-semester masters students in complex theoretical concepts by encouraging self-reflection and creative authorship.

The theoretical branch of the course involves lectures and discussions, engaging with theories of media ecology from their early anticipations (Kiesler 1939) to their defining approaches (McLuhan 1967, Strate 2017). Design is understood through the environment, or as transformation of lived environments (i.e. the Future Ecologies series ed. Löffler, Mareis, & Sprenger since 2021, and in a historical perspective Busbea 2020). Gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances, which Don Norman (2013) translated to a key principle for user-centric design, offers a bridge to design practice, and the theory of metaphors is introduced as a foundational mode of creative thinking.

The practical branch of the course frames typography and publication as tools for conceptual analysis, integrating excerpts from the theoretical texts into increasingly complex visual assignments. Students also keep a scrappy physical journal or “commonplace book” with 30 entries, each linking an in-class idea to an external one. Each student’s final publication is an “autobiographical user manual” guiding the “user” through the course based on the student’s subjective experience.

Student work revealed unique representations of theoretical content and strong metaphorical thinking, and many projects were reflective of students’ fresh experiences of a new environment during their first semester in a foreign country. Publications ranged from a hand-bound dictionary of terms, to ChatGPT’s “diary,” to directions through a distorted Berlin, to thirty existential questions posed by a whimsical humanoid peach. We heard from many students who found the course structure engaging and welcoming.

Our theoretical/practical approach is supported by an abundance of research on the educational benefits of multimodal learning, or engaging with more than one “mode” of accessing information (i.e. Moreno & Mayer 2007, Serafini 2015) especially when studying in a second language (Yi & Choi 2015), as well as metacognitive reflection (understanding one’s own understanding of a topic, i.e. Cummings 2015).

Our course offers an example of how explorations of ecological thinking and typography can support each other, but more broadly how collaborations across disciplines can be mutually beneficial, and increase the accessibility of both.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Kaithi Script’s Revival: An Intersection of Design and Cultural Inheritance

Script revival serves as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural identity.

Anmol Shrivastava
Assistant Professor
Illinois State University

Kaithi (KAE-THEE), also known as Kayathi or Kayasthi, is a script that was once widely used in northern India. Now classified as a “major extinct” script, Kaithi once flourished alongside companion scripts like Devanagari and other major Indian scripts of today. The name Kaithi is derived from ‘Kayastha’, a cultural group known as “scribes”. I am a Kayastha.

Script revival is crucial to colonized cultures, serving as a means of reclaiming and preserving cultural identity. It fosters pride, heritage transmission, and resistance to cultural homogenization, empowering communities to rebuild unique identities and celebrate their heritage.

This presentation explores the intersection of design and ancestry through a personal journey to revive the nearly extinct Kaithi script, historically used by my ancestors, the Kayasthas. It will demonstrate how design can become a powerful tool for historical and cultural revival, offering a unique perspective on the interplay between design, identity, and heritage.

By delving into sparse historical documents of Kaithi and sharing a personal journey of self-learning the script, the presentation will showcase current and upcoming projects that combine typography, type design, lettering, poster design, and embroidery. It will explore projects aimed at broadening the reach of this nearly extinct script by making Kaithi easier to self-teach. This presentation will illustrate how design can play a crucial role in reconnecting with and reviving our ancestral roots, fostering a deeper sense of identity and belonging.

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Typography as Racialization: Euro-American Craft and Asian Labor

Exploring the capacity of conventional genres of activity in graphic design to narrate historical phenomena.

Chris Lee
Associate Professor
Pratt Institute

This project undertakes the design of a “chop suey” typeface called 1882–1982–2019. The general aim of the project vis-a-vis design research is to explore the capacity of conventional genres of activity in graphic design to narrate historical phenomena, while also figuring design as a vehicle of antagonism, and as a space of contestation. The project enacts graphic design research not by dint of the traditional forms of scholarly research and creative activity that go into it (i.e. as transparents texts written for academic publications, or work created for display in public exhibitions, where both constitute forms of production valorized within through institutional peer-review processes, for instance), but rather by the fact that it produces a form (a typeface) that is not typically legible as an artifact that instantiates scientific knowledge production. Furthermore, such an artifact acts as a case that exceeds the conventional pathways initiating and animating design (i.e. the client brief), and thus does not satisfy even commercial valorization—that is to say, it has little to no prospective value as a commercial product. In sum, the project is an argument for design outcomes as a form of discursive (quasi-)autonomous design-as-research, recognized as such only by the grace of its inclusion in design discourse (hence, the above qualification, “quasi”).

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In the case of this project—a typeface in three ‘weights’ (called 1882, 1982, 2019, respectively)—the outcomes serve as vehicles for a historical narration of the status of the “Asian,” or what Iyko Day calls “alien capital” in North American settler-colonial political economy. The primary outcome of this project is the process of producing the typeface itself. This entails a raw archival excavation directly sourced from historical material (1882, the year that the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress); the “correction” or “refinement” of these according to the kinds of normative idealizations articulated by figures like Gerard Unger, Karen Cheng, etc. (1982, a seminal year in the history of the formation of “Asian-American” as a racial subject position); as well as the generation of AI generated “hanji” (Chinese ideograms) in resonance with Day’s characterization, as well as popular depictions of the “Yellow Peril” that persist from the anti-Chinese attitudes that have persisted from the 1880s until today (2019). In sum, the work aims to prompt a reflection on the extent to which design outcomes are inflected by somatic knowledge and subjective performance (from calligraphic skill to “craftsmanship” in writing AI prompts), in spite of the fact that very little to none of this is residual and legible in the final artifact. Sofie Fetokaki’s work on classical musical performance pedagogy provides a clarifying lens for examining the role of performance and charisma in valorizing and institutionalizing what Diana Taylor calls “performatic” knowledge as objective, inevitable, and stable basis of evaluation in graphic design outcomes in formal educational contexts like accredited design schools.

The typeface is framed by a typographic specimen book that serves the conventional functions of such publications, namely, unpacking the origins/inspirations of the typographical forms. The story that emerges demonstrates the ways that “alien capital” has served as one foil (that is, one Other, amongst whiteness’ many other Others) against which white Euro-American normativity has been defined. Tracing the history of anti-Chinese, and more broadly, anti-Asian animus for over a century and a half, yields an account of attitudes that are resonant with the ones that subtend and stabilize otherwise contestable ideas about validity, correctness, and progressive excellence in typography and graphic design today. As scholars in whiteness studies like Ruth Frankenberg have articulated, “whiteness” lacks its own internally coherent content, and is figured primarily by all the things that it is not. In short, the project aims to serve as a case for examining the way that typographic design has participated in the construction of whiteness. The project casts typography itself as a racialized field, while also functioning as an actuator of what the race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant call “racialization.” In this narrative, Euro-American craft is given its content, marked tautologically by aesthetic ideals articulated primarily in contrast to the outcomes of “cheap Chinese labor.”

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.

Copy, Transform, Combine: Extrapolating from 19th Century American Wood TypeOld World, New Forms: Extrapolating 19th Century American Wood Type

The repurposing of Variable OpenType technology as a tool of digital preservation

Javier Viramontes
Visiting Lecturer
Rochester Institute of Technology

“Copy, Transform, Combine,” refers to a 2017 University of New Haven exhibition of historically significant Swiss posters from the private collection of Tom Strong, with the aim of deepening the historical/practical education of graphic design students with a more immersive material and contextual experience. The title of the exhibition outlines a methodology of using archives in an experiential manner to engage history, not as a static memory, but rather as an experience that allows students to revisit design history through their own perspectives, allowing them to copy, transform, and combine new works based on historical exemplars.

“Copy, Transform, Combine,” can also serve as a unique way to rethink historical preservation. For this presentation, we will discuss the repurposing of Variable OpenType technology as a tool of digital preservation of Aldine Expanded, a 19th-century American Wood Type design, first manufactured by The Hamilton Mfg. Co., Two Rivers, Wis. As indicated by the research of David Shields, Associate Professor, Department of Graphic Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, 19th-century letterforms such as Aldine Expanded were produced in a time without standardized classification systems. Furthermore, without notions of intellectual property or copyright, 19th-century movable wood type designs were often plagiarized, altered, or expanded without a sense of attribution. This typographic revival aims at mapping and classifying Aldine’s various copies and offshoots into a single digital Variable Opentype font file sourced from various design archives.

This presentation will discuss the early and middle stages of this experiment. We are interested in engaging design educators looking to engage archives through preservation, remixing, and the study of historical visual culture through contemporary design technologies.

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

Mining for Ideas: Collaborative Collages as Spaces of Opportunity

A method founded in play and inspired by design history

Anna Jordan
Assistant Professor
Rochester Institute of Technology

I will present a method that I designed to help students and practicing designers come up with new and surprising ideas. The method, called “Mining for Ideas,” is grounded in collaboration and experimentation. It can be used in a classroom or design studio setting to effectively generate ideas about both form and concept. Designers begin with a collaborative collage game, involving an enormous selection of unconventional tools and materials, leading to spectacular sculptural creations. Each sculptural collage is altered by each designer, leading to truly collaborative pieces. Next, designers photograph the sculptures to create two-dimensional images that are mined for ideas, similar as to how a miner would chip away at earth to reveal valuable gems. Very quickly, designers generate many surprising ideas, each with corresponding examples of concrete design elements such as typography, grid, texture, color, and image. Then, the raw ideas are expanded into applied pieces of graphic design via a flexible morphology that is structured around these concrete design elements. The method is founded in play and inspired by design history precedent including my personal design practice, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawing game, and Skolos-Wedell’s form-to-content method for designing posters. In this presentation, I will illustrate how the method works with several examples from my classroom, explain how the method could be applied to various design problems, and cite student interviews as evidence proving that the process is successful.

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