Instructors



Nicole Dotin

Co-founder, lead instructor of Latin One and Two

Nicole is a typeface designer and partner at the Process Type Foundry, located in her adopted home state of Minnesota, USA. Working at a small independent type foundry for more than 15 years has allowed her to flex her generalist tendencies, handling everything from designing custom typefaces to brokering large licensing deals to diving into font production. Her retail releases include Elena and Pique.

Nicole started her career as a graphic designer working for a community arts organization. Before that, she received her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in visual studies (a.k.a. graphic design). She later took on the role of educator and taught typography and web design at her alma mater. She has enjoyed watching her students develop their own successful careers. Some of them are even type designers.

While Nicole could have happily continued teaching, she left her position at MCAD to attend the University of Reading, where she received an MA in typeface design with distinction. That smooth sentence belies just how difficult it was for her to achieve that: writing, a central component of the MA, is one of Nicole’s great foes.

Since then, she has become an active part of the type design community. She is a member of Alphabettes, founded Alphacrit, has given workshops at ATypI and TypoLabs, and has judged SOTA’s Typography Award and Catalyst Award, as well as the TDC’s annual type design competition. If you want to know more, try the Process Type website.

Sol Matas

Co-founder, lead instructor of Latin One and Two

Sol lives and breathes type design in her beloved adopted city of Berlin. From her sunny studio, she collaborates with an international type and design community.

Type design found and claimed her during her formative years at Universidad de Buenos Aires. She mingled and shared classes with architects, and those technical ideas infused her design methodology with the functional precision of an engineer. After spending time at Saatchi & Saatchi, she set out on her own, and formed a new studio.

Client projects have led her to research glyphs for Cyrillic, Greek, Oriya, and Devanagari, uncovering the history and meaning of the strokes.

She lectures and teaches type design around the world, and her type projects have been selected for the European Design Awards, the Bienal Tipos Latinos, Sello Buen Diseño 10° Edition, and the International Typography Congress in Valencia.

Building community and organizations is second nature to her. Collaborations and contributions include: board member of the Type Directors Club, typefaces for The Typecraft Initiative in India, women’s network Alphabettes, Typographica, Berlin’s Typostammtisch, and her own Hungry Type Society.

Kimya Gandhi

Lead instructor, Devanagari One and Two

Kimya Gandhi is a type designer from Mumbai with a passionate interest in Indic type design. Kimya holds a Bachelors degree in Communication Design from National Institute of Fashion Technology, Bombay. She further went on to pursue specialization in the form of M.Des in Visual Communication at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. She got her professional start interning at Linotype in 2010. Over the next few years she freelanced for several type foundries catering to their multi-script requirements. In 2015 she became a partner at Mota Italic and now focuses on Indic and Latin designs for retail and custom corporate projects.

When not drawing typefaces, Kimya regularly teaches type design and typography at several design institutes. She also stays active creating custom wedding invitations.

Fer Cozzi

Visiting Lecturer, Latin Two

Fer Cozzi is an independent type designer born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She obtained her diploma at the University of Buenos Aires, where she teaches in the Master in typeface design. Talkative and passionate about letters, some of her work has been selected for renowned typography exhibitions and has participated in various typography conferences and events around the world. In her work she seeks to explore rhythms, shapes and strokes where randomness and a not-so-obvious rationality meet. When she’s not drawing letters, she’s probably dancing to the rhythm of 90s pop.

Noopur Datye

Visiting lecturer, Devanagari Two

Noopur Datye is a type designer and calligrapher from Mumbai, India. A graduate of Sir J J Institute of Applied Art, she is one of the co-founders of Ek Type, a collaborative type foundry that has designed typefaces in sixteen of the many scripts used in South Asia. Her work includes custom Bengali and Devanagari typefaces for television channels Star Jalsa and LifeOk, open source typefaces Mukta Vaani (Gujarati), Mukta Mahee (Gurmukhi), Baloo (Gujarati, Bangla), Noto (Dogra, Gunjala Gondi and Masaram Gondi), Anek Mukti-script family, Honk and Nithya Ranjana. Her works have won several awards including the Yellow, Graphite and Wooden pencils at D&AD, the Black and Blue Elephant at Kyoorius Design Awards and multiple TDC awards. Noopur is an active member of Aksharaya and regularly conducts workshops on calligraphy and letterform design at design schools and conferences in India.

Liang Hai

Visiting lecturer, Devanagari Two

Liang is a Unicode–OpenType developer based in The Hague, the Netherlands. As Typotheque’s “multilingual font technologist”, he closely works with designers to correctly produce fonts for various scripts, from each project’s early planning to the eventual release. Outside of his day job, he volunteers most of his time to the Unicode Standard, participating in (too) many groups, in particular the Script Encoding WG and the Editorial WG.

He has a focus on the so-called “complex scripts” such as the Indic scripts and Mongolian. Due to how these scripts are encoded in Unicode, their users continue to suffer from technical complexities. For example, without a good understanding of the OpenType Layout technology, one can’t even reliably produce a Devanagari font that shapes correctly. He’s been trying to change this situation.

Maria Montes

Visiting lecturer, Latin One

Maria Montes is an independent lettering designer and illustrator specialised in branding assets and calligraphy education. Originally from Barcelona, she moved to Australia in 2006 where she currently resides.

Her multidisciplinary practice expands across brand identity, packaging illustration, custom lettering, editorial, fashion, art and culture. She has been teaching calligraphy independently since 2014.

Maria studied a Postgraduate Course in Advanced Typography in Barcelona and a Condensed Program in Typeface Design at Type@Cooper in NYC. In 2018 she released her first display chromatic font family called Green Fairy.

Valerio Monopoli

Visiting critic, Latin Two

I started my career as a designer in Rome, where I worked in branding and video-mapping projects. At the age of 24 I moved to Barcelona to study Editorial Design at ELISAVA and Type Design at EINA. Shortly after I joined the Extra! team with whom I designed custom fonts for clients such as Mnactec, Zara Home and Club de Creativos. In 2020 I started my solo adventure in the world of typography.

I publish typefaces under the acronym Morula Type, a name that represents my vision of typefaces as an ever-growing organism. Over the past two years, I have collaborated with foundries such as Pangram Pangram, OffType, Type01, BlazeType, Lift Type, Collletttivo, Cast Foundry and Zetafonts, publishing fonts used by Nike, Leica, Museu Picasso, Riot Games, Corinthians Football Club and many others.

Lipi Raval

Visiting critic, Devanagari Two

Lipi is an independent type designer from Baroda, India, and is currently based in London, UK. She specialises in Indic scripts like Devanagari and Gujarati. Her design practice is informed by traditional crafts of India, and is influenced by her immediate environment. She enjoys long walks, foraging, and swimming when not at her desk.

Aleksandra Samuļenkova

Visiting lecturer and critic, Latin Two

Aleksandra is a Latvian-born type designer based in the Netherlands. She graduated from the TypeMedia master program at KABK in The Hague. Her award-winning typeface Pilot is among the few contemporary type designs to be cast in metal. For several years, Aleksandra worked as a type designer at LucasFonts in Berlin; after that, moved to the Netherlands, where she pursued independent projects and joined Bold Monday to work on Cyrillic and Greek extensions of the IBM Plex type family.

Pooja Saxena

Visiting lecturer, Devanagari Two

An award-winning typeface and graphic designer, Pooja Saxena divides her time between being a team member at TypeTogether, and her own independent practice, Matra Type. Her work focuses on design in and for Indic scripts, notably Devanagari, and studying typographic visual languages that emerge in India. She is a devoted collector of ephemera and chronicler of street lettering, and writes a newsletter about type and design curiosities called I Spy with my Typographic Eye.

Aashim Tyagi

Visiting lecturer, Devanagari One

Aashim Tyagi is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, graphic design and text.

His photographs are observational and intimate, exploring the themes of memory, time, displacement and longing.

Prior edition’s visiting instructors

2024, Devanagari One

Aashim Tyagi / Lipi Raval

2023, Devanagari One (was Introduction to Devanagari)

Parimal Parmar / Aashim Tyagi

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