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

SAN FRANCISCO — For ten years, a quiet revolution in typography has been quietly brewing on the West Coast, bridging the gap between centuries-old printing traditions and cutting-edge digital design. The Letterform Archive is celebrating a major institutional milestone this fall: the tenth anniversary of its premier type design certificate program, Type West.

To mark the occasion, the Archive has launched a sweeping retrospective exhibition titled Type for All! Ten Years of Type West, running in its main San Francisco gallery from September 26 to November 15, 2026. The expansive showcase features more than 260 examples of student work, offering a rare glimpse into the grueling, exhilarating, and highly creative process of crafting professional typefaces from scratch.

The exhibition is accompanied by a commemorative 64-page softcover publication of the same name. Edited to capture the breadth of a decade’s worth of education, the book features student type specimens, process sketches, and institutional history. In a nod to accessibility, the publication is available free of charge in the gallery and for just $1 for worldwide shipping through October 18, 2026.

Main Facts: The Scope of the Milestone

• The Exhibition: Type for All! Ten Years of Type West is on display at Letterform Archive’s main gallery from September 26 through November 15, 2026.
• The Scale: Over 260 pieces of student work are featured, representing every single cohort since the program’s inception in 2016.
• The Publication: A 64-page companion book, Type for All! Ten Years of Type West, serves as both a catalog and a historical artifact, featuring an endpaper index set in the actual typefaces designed by the graduates.
• Global Reach: Since expanding to include an online cohort in 2021, the program has drawn students from 31 countries, spanning the globe from Argentina to Zimbabwe.
• Leadership: The exhibition is 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: From Cooper Union Collaboration to a Global Digital Community

The history of Type West is a story of organic growth, institutional evolution, and adaptation to a changing educational landscape.

The program was born in 2016 under the moniker Type@Cooper West, operating as an in-person, immersive experience in collaboration with New York City’s prestigious Cooper Union. For its first two years, the physical studio served local designers looking to master the arcane and meticulous art of digital and physical font creation.

In 2018, the partnership between Letterform Archive and Cooper Union concluded amicably. Rather than halting the program, the Archive took full ownership, rebranding the curriculum simply as Type West. Operating out of the Archive’s San Francisco space, the year-long certificate program quickly carved out a reputation as one of the premier typography incubators in North America.

A critical inflection point arrived in 2021 when the program introduced an online cohort in response to global shifts in education. This pivot fundamentally transformed Type West from a localized Bay Area workshop into an international powerhouse. Today, the program counts students from 31 countries among its alumni network, uniting typographic traditions from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Supporting Data: Inside the Archive and the Studio

Curating a decade of typographic output presented a formidable logistical challenge for Löfkvist and Riechers. How does an institution distill ten years of intensive study, hundreds of students, and thousands of glyphs into a single gallery space and a 64-page book?

The curators solved this by focusing not just on finished digital fonts, but on the messy, human reality of the studio process. Visitors to the exhibition are treated to:

• Initial sketches and iterative proofs showing how a rough concept evolves into a functional font family.
• Instructor markups detailing the rigorous feedback loop necessary to refine letter proportions, spacing, and rhythm.
• Physical artifacts, including a striking example of letters painstakingly cut into stone with a hammer and chisel during a first-term weekend workshop.
• Historical pairings: In ten key installations, student typefaces are displayed alongside items from Letterform Archive’s permanent collection—ranging from rare, centuries-old handbound volumes to disposable vernacular print ephemera—demonstrating how historical research fuels contemporary design.

Solving the Index Problem

One of the most innovative design solutions in the project involved honoring every single graduate. Seeking a way to list all 260+ certificate recipients without overwhelming the physical gallery or exceeding page limits, the curators devised a running index. Every student’s name and their corresponding typeface are typeset in that exact typeface. This index serves dual duty: it greets visitors as they walk through the Archive’s front doors on a massive gallery wall, and it wraps up the companion book as its final endpapers.

Gathering the OpenType Font (OTF) files required months of administrative outreach, countless spreadsheets, and enthusiastic collaboration from alumni around the world. The effort underscored a vital new mandate for the Archive: preserving student work—both analog and digital—as a core part of design history.

Official Responses and Perspectives

The philosophy driving Type West hinges on balancing rigorous historical scholarship with individual artistic expression.

"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," reflected Estefania Leyva, a graduate of the 2022 cohort.

Burçin Canbay, a 2025 graduate, echoed this sentiment: "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 program’s faculty views the success of its students not just through individual career achievements, but through their collective impact on global visual culture.

"I have witnessed so many graduates making meaningful contributions to our world of type in their local communities," noted Sahar Afshar, a lead instructor in the program.

Angela Riechers, Education Director at Letterform Archive, captures the emotional resonance of watching alumni succeed: "When we spot an alumni typeface ‘in the wild’—set huge on a billboard, as pages of beautiful text in a book, glowing as film titles on the big screen, or starring in a brand identity—we feel an almost parental flash of pride seeing our little characters all grown up and out on their own."

Implications: The Future of Independent Type Design

The impact of Type West extends far beyond the walls of the Letterform Archive. By democratizing access to high-level type design education—particularly through its hybrid and online formats—the program has helped decentralize the global type foundry landscape.

Alumni are increasingly striking out on their own, reshaping the commercial and artistic spheres of graphic design:

• Eugime Lee (’25) was named an Art Directors Club Young Ones winner.
• Joke De Winter (’23) advanced her studies at the world-renowned Master’s Program at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
• Graduates have launched independent foundries and studios across the globe, including Libbie Bischoff’s Type du Nord (’23), Chris Skillern’s Tulsey Type (’21), and Joshua Michael Diaz’s The Type Fella (’23).
• International recognition continues to grow, such as Iván Castro (’25), who successfully licensed his font Ecléctica through Argentina’s premier independent foundry, Sudtipos.

Furthermore, the diversity of the output—spanning Latin scripts, Arabic, Indic writing systems, Kanji, and Indigenous North American typography—proves that the foundational principles of letterform design remain endlessly adaptable. Whether a student is building a multiweight bell-bottomed 1970s script, engineering a wood-routed typeface free of right angles (like Ryan Molloy’s Banch), or engraving stone, Type West graduates are proving that the future of typography is as rich, varied, and boundary-pushing as its past.

• Type for All! Ten Years of Type West is open at Letterform Archive in San Francisco through November 15, 2026. Information on gallery hours, tickets, and the commemorative book can be found on the Letterform Archive website.