Nicole Dotin

Lead instructor

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.

Follow Nicole

Sol Matas

Lead instructor

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: typefaces for The Typecraft Initiative in India, women’s network Alphabettes, Typographica, Berlin’s Typostammtisch, and her own Hungry Type Society.

Follow Sol

Rutherford Craze

Visiting Lecturer

Rutherford Craze is a type designer and programmer originally from the UK, with a background in graphic design and web development. He graduated in 2019 from the Type and Media MA program in The Hague before establishing his own type foundry, Mass-Driver, in early 2020.

As a type designer, his interest is in understanding the technical, material, and social context of each project: from the software that compiles a font, to the paper on which it’s printed, and the license under which it’s sold.

Follow Rutherford

Kalapi Gajjar-Bordawekar

Visiting lecturer

Kalapi is a typeface designer and font engineer. His primary interest lies in developing original typeface designs for emerging typographic contexts in the Indian sub-continent along with historical and technological research. He's a graduate of the Master of Arts in Typeface Design program from the University of Reading, UK. In 2016, he joined forces with friend and fellow Reading graduate Gunnar Vilhjálmsson to set-up Universal Thirst, a design practice specializing in developing typefaces for writing systems of the Indian sub-continent. Since its inception, Universal Thirst has taken on bespoke projects for Google, The Gourmand, Frieze Art Fair, DesignMarch, Monotype, and Falcon Enamelware. Kalapi lives between Vancouver, Canada and Bangalore, India.

Follow Kalapi

Cyrus Highsmith

Visiting critic & lecturer

Cyrus is a letter drawer, teacher, author, and graphic artist. He teaches type design at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He wrote and illustrated the acclaimed primer Inside Paragraphs: Typographic Fundamentals. In 2015, he received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize for extraordinary contributions to the fields of type design, typography, and type education. In 2017, he and his foundry, Occupant Fonts, joined Morisawa to be the Japanese type company’s Latin alphabet counterpart.

Follow Cyrus

Laura Meseguer

Visiting critic

Laura is a freelance designer, typographer, and type designer. Her activity is developed in the field of commercial work and personal projects. She specializes in any kind of project based on typography and type, from lettering for monograms and logotypes to custom typefaces and book design. In addition to her practice, Laura has been teaching Type design and Typography in Barcelona, running workshops, and giving talks everywhere. She is the author of “TypoMag. Typography in Magazines” and, together with Cristóbal Henestrosa & José Scaglione, co-author of the book “Cómo crear tipografías. Del boceto a la pantalla” published by Tipo e, in Spanish and translated into Polish, Portuguese, English and recently in Chinese. She is a co-founder of Type-Ø-Tones a digital type foundry, from which she publishes and promotes all her typefaces.

Follow Laura

Aleksandra Samuļenkova

Visiting lecturer

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.

Follow Aleksandra

Alice Savoie

Visiting lecturer

Alice is an independent type designer and researcher based in France. She holds an MA and a PhD from the University of Reading (UK). As a practicing type designer, she has collaborated with international foundries and design studios. Her recent type design work includes Faune, an award-winning typeface family commissioned by the French Centre National des Arts Plastiques, and Romain 20, distributed by 205.tf. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the Leverhulme-funded “Women in Type” research project at the University of Reading. She teaches typeface design at ANRT Nancy (France) and Ecal Lausanne (Switzerland).

Follow Alice

Nina Stössinger

Visiting lecturer

Nina is a Senior Typeface Designer at Frere-Jones Type, and a Critic for typeface design at Yale School of Art. In addition to several retail typefaces (including Empirica and Conductor, both designed with Tobias Frere-Jones), she has co-designed custom type for Microsoft, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and New York City’s Moynihan Train Hall, among others. Originally from Basel in Switzerland, Nina studied multi-media design in Halle/Germany, and type design in Zurich and The Hague. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat.

Photo of Nina by Graham MacIndoe.

Follow Nina