Celebrating a Decade of Type: Letterform Archive Marks 10 Years of the Type West Certificate Program with Landmark Exhibition and Publication

SAN FRANCISCO — In the realm of graphic design, a single letter is never merely a collection of curves, stems, and serifs. It is a vessel of history, a technical feat of engineering, and a canvas for contemporary expression. For the past ten years, the Letterform Archive has been at the forefront of nurturing this philosophy through its premier year-long certificate program in type design.

To commemorate this significant milestone, the Archive has announced a major retrospective exhibition, Type for All! Ten Years of Type West, running in its main gallery from September 26 through November 15, 2026. Featuring over 260 examples of student work spanning every cohort since the program’s inception, the exhibition honors a decade of creative output, pedagogical evolution, and global community building.

The retrospective is accompanied by a commemorative 64-page publication of the same name. Together, the exhibition and book offer an exhaustive look at how contemporary designers breathe new life into centuries-old visual traditions, utilizing the Archive’s vast physical and digital collections as a wellspring of inspiration.

Main Facts: The Exhibition and the Milestones

• Event: Type for All! Ten Years of Type West exhibition.
• Dates: September 26 – November 15, 2026.
• Location: Letterform Archive Main Gallery, San Francisco, California.
• Scale: Over 260 examples of original student work, encompassing finished OpenType fonts (OTFs), initial pencil sketches, iterative proofs, instructor markups, and analog artifacts.
• Scope: Features contributions from every cohort since the program began in 2016, representing designers from 31 countries ranging from Argentina to Zimbabwe.
• Leadership: Curated by Grendl Löfkvist, Dean of Type West, and Angela Riechers, Education Director at Letterform Archive. Current lead instructors include Maria (“Masha”) Doreuli and Sahar Afshar.

Chronology: The Evolution of Type West

The journey of the Type West certificate program is a story of institutional evolution, adaptation, and international expansion.

2016: The Cooper Union Partnership

The program originated in 2016 as Type@Cooper West, an in-person, intensive educational experience established in collaboration with New York City’s prestigious Cooper Union. Designed to bring rigorous typographic training to the West Coast, the initial cohorts laid the groundwork for a burgeoning regional hub of type design. Early alumni, such as Kimberly Rhee (creator of Florrence) and Damon Styer (creator of New Bohemian Flare), set a high benchmark for the rigorous curriculum.

2018: Independence and Rebranding

Following an amicable parting of ways with Cooper Union in 2018, the program transitioned fully under the stewardship of the Letterform Archive. Shedding its previous moniker, it became simply Type West. Operating independently allowed the program to integrate even more deeply with the Archive’s physical collection, treating rare volumes, broadsides, and ephemera as immediate tools for student research.

2021: The Global Pivot

Recognizing the global demand for rigorous typographic education—and adapting to the realities of a shifting educational landscape—Type West introduced an online cohort in 2021. This digital expansion transformed the classroom from a local San Francisco studio into a truly borderless community. Today, the program counts students from 31 countries among its alumni, enriching the stylistic vocabulary of the student body with diverse linguistic perspectives, writing systems, and cultural design traditions.

Supporting Data and Archival Logistics

Curating a decade’s worth of education for both a physical gallery space and a concise 64-page book presented a monumental logistical challenge. The curatorial team—Grendl Löfkvist and Angela Riechers—had to strike a delicate balance between large-format specimen posters and intimate process sketches, as well as representation from both in-person and online cohorts.

A core tenet of the project was honoring every single graduate who earned a Type West certificate. Faced with spatial constraints on gallery walls and page-count limits in the publication, the team engineered an elegant typographic solution: a running list of every student’s name and their corresponding typeface, set directly in that specific typeface. This dynamic index greets visitors upon entering the Letterform Archive gallery and serves as the striking endpapers for the companion book.

Gathering assets required reaching out to more than 260 individuals to source their original .otf (OpenType font) files.

"The process required spreadsheets—so many spreadsheets!—and a great deal of administrative help, but type people are good people; the alumni rallied admirably and soon the emails were pouring in with everything we’d asked for,"
noted the curatorial team.

This massive undertaking underscored a new realization for the institution: part of the Archive’s core mission must be the active preservation of student work, capturing both analog sketches and digital font data for posterity.

Official Responses and Pedagogical Philosophy

At the heart of Type West’s success is a pedagogy that treats type design as a living bridge between historical craft and cutting-edge digital execution. Current lead instructors Maria (“Masha”) Doreuli and Sahar Afshar, alongside a rotating roster of expert co-instructors, emphasize patience, proportion, and rhythm.

Sahar Afshar reflected on the global impact of the alumni network:

"I have witnessed so many graduates making meaningful contributions to our world of type in their local communities."

This sentiment is echoed by the students themselves. Estefania Leyva (Type West 2022), designer of the typeface Umbral, shared:

"Learning type design at Type West was a transformative experience that deepened my appreciation for the intricacies of letterforms and taught me to be patient and flexible in my design process."

Burçin Canbay (Type West 2025), creator of Topkapi, similarly noted:

"Type West trained my eye to evaluate the proportion, rhythm, and spacing of letters with clarity. I learned to approach type design as both a historical discipline and a contemporary practice."

The Archive Connection

A defining feature of the exhibition is the deliberate pairing of student work with ten historical artifacts from the Letterform Archive’s collection. By placing vernacular ephemera—such as 1968 political posters from Paris’s Atelier Populaire or historical wood type specimens—alongside modern student creations, the exhibition demonstrates how contemporary designers draw upon existing material culture to forge unique visual identities.

The Archive’s collection makes no strict hierarchical distinction between centuries-old handbound volumes and disposable commercial ephemera. This egalitarian approach to design history empowers students to draw inspiration from diverse sources, blending their personal backgrounds and lived experiences into functional, beautiful letterforms.

Implications: The Global Footprint of Type West Graduates

The true legacy of the Type West program is writ large across the contemporary typographic landscape. Graduates are not only entering the profession; they are shaping its future, launching independent foundries, winning prestigious international awards, and licensing fonts through major global distributors.

• Award Recognition: Eugime Lee (Type West 2025) was recently named one of the winners of the prestigious Art Directors Club Young Ones student competition for the project Aether.
• Advanced Studies: Joke De Winter (Type West 2023) continued her academic journey at the world-renowned Master’s Program in Type Design at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
• Foundry Ventures: Several alumni have leveraged their certificate projects into independent commercial enterprises. Libbie Bischoff (Type West 2023) established Type du Nord; Chris Skillern (Type West 2021) founded Tulsey Type; Joshua Michael Diaz (Type West 2023) launched The Type Fella; and Iván Castro (Type West 2025) successfully licensed his font Ecléctica through the prominent Argentine foundry Sudtipos.

Whether spotting an alumnus’s typeface set across a massive billboard, gracing the pages of a literary publication, glowing as a film title on screen, or anchoring a corporate brand identity, the faculty at Letterform Archive experience a profound sense of institutional pride.

As Type for All! demonstrates, the basic characters of the alphabet are infinite in their potential. Through a decade of dedicated teaching, rigorous historical study, and international outreach, Type West has ensured that the future of type design is as diverse, global, and inventive as the human hand and digital screen allow.