Our Associate Curator and Editorial Director, Stephen Coles, will present highlights from the Archive’s growing collection of global writing systems, including posters, type specimens, and other typographic artifacts. Special guests with expertise in specific scripts will be your guides.

For this event we’ll travel to regions beyond our first “Typographic Trip” (which focused on Arabic objects in the collection). Journey with us to avant-garde Russia, 1920s Japan, mid-century India, and contemporary South Korea.

Stephen “Stewf” Coles, Letterform Archive’s Associate Curator & Editorial Director, joined the staff after serving on our Board of Directors since its inception. Born in Salt Lake City, he moved to San Francisco in 2004 to serve as FontShop’s creative director. He later worked as an independent consultant, connecting font makers with font users, and wrote the book The Anatomy of Type. With his background in design and journalism, combined with an obsession for type history, Stephen is responsible for the online face and voice of the Archive, and helps to shape the future of the collection. He continues to publish the influential websites Typographica and Fonts In Use.

Tanya George is an independent typographer, type designer, and design educator from India. She worked as a graphic designer before getting a Masters in Typeface Design from the University of Reading. Currently, she is pursuing a that includes type walks around Mumbai, as well as workshops and writing about type.

Ksenya Samarskaya is a creative practitioner working between the Iberian and North American coasts. Samarskaya & Partners is a creative practice with a collaboration model at heart, featuring a rotating team of kick-ass designers, developers, copywriters, and artists, who come together to craft logotypes, brand strategies, research, writing, and multilingual type design.

John Hudson designs typefaces and makes fonts. As co-founder of Tiro Typeworks Ltd., a digital foundry specialising in custom font solutions for multilingual publishing and computing, he has been responsible for or has collaborated on type designs for Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Latin, Odia, Sinhala, Telugu, Thai, and other scripts. Tiro’s clients include software companies such as Adobe and Microsoft, and scholarly publishers such as Brill and Harvard University Press, and the STIpub consortium of scientific publishers.

Florence Fu is a writer and type designer in New York. She holds a B.A. in Art History and a B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University, and is a graduate of Type West’s yearlong type design certificate program. She is a contributor to Letterform Archive and Sharp Type Co.

Rob Keller & Kimya Gandhi run the type design studio Mota Italic. Founded in Berlin, re-located to Mumbai, and now freshly back in Berlin, Mota Italic focuses on custom & retail multi-script type families.

Kimya comes from Mumbai and got into typeface design early in her studies. She primarily works with Devanagari, but is passionate about many Indic scripts. When not making fonts, Kimya is probably teaching or conducting workshops on type design &/or typography.

Birthed in a corn field of Illinois, Rob discovered that studying and working in type design was a great excuse to move to Europe. He started Mota Italic in 2008 and still considers himself lucky to have gotten into this peculiar & niche specialization.

Erin McLaughlin is a typeface designer and consultant specializing in Indic scripts. She is a co-organizer of TypeWknd, and is passionate about helping people to digitize, revive, and expand the use of indigenous and minority writing systems and languages.

Maria Doreuli was born and raised in Moscow. The interest in fine arts and graphic arts lead her to Moscow State University of Printing where besides the academical art classes she gained an interest in typography and type design. In 2012 after a second attempt she was accepted to Type and Media course in the Hague where she focused on the ways to integrate sketching in type design process. She founded an independent studio Contrast Foundry in 2014 which became international in 2018 when Maria moved to the US. Maria's work was awarded by many prestigious awards including Type Directors Club, ADC, Letter.2, Morisawa among others.

About the Salon Series

The Archive Salon Series is a monthly event featuring a member of the staff — or a guest expert — taking a deeper dive into specific collections or themes within Letterform Archive. Salon video recordings are available to Letterform Archive members.