FRIDAY–SATURDAY, AUGUST 08–09

Workshops

FRIDAY

The Flourish Effect: Fundamentals for Any Script

WHEN: Friday, August 08, 2025
WHERE: TBD
TIME: 8:30a–11:30a
LEADER: Aspacia Kusulas

Flourishes are more than mere decoration: they’re graceful extensions of letter strokes, adding charm and elegance to your designs. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll explore the fundamental elements and logic behind creating successful flourishes. Learn how to analyze and deconstruct existing flourishes, gaining a deeper understanding of form, rhythm, and balance.

Throughout the session, we’ll review various types of flourishes, uncovering their historical references and uses. From classic to contemporary styles, you’ll discover that flourishes aren’t just pretty; they’re essential elements that enhance interest and visual appeal.

You’ll be able to craft unique flourishes ready to elevate your calligraphy practice, lettering pieces, or type projects. Working from pencil to calligraphic tools, you’ll experiment with various lettering styles and discover the art of creating flourishes with depth and balance.

All supplies will be included.

Aspacía Kusulas is a lettering artist, type designer, calligrapher, and educator based in Los Angeles and Mexico City. With a background in graphic design and type design studies at Type@Cooper, she merges historical influences with modern aesthetics to create distinctive letterforms. Her practice is rooted in craftsmanship, specializing in custom calligraphy, lettering, and letterpress printing for brand identity, publications, and bespoke commissions. Through KOUS, the design studio and educational platform she co-founded, she shares her passion for the written form, offering workshops and resources to inspire and empower letter enthusiasts in their creative journey. Constantly evolving her practice, she finds inspiration in the intersection of design, typography, and the human touch.
@aspaciakusulas
@designkous

COST: $125
Limited to 10 participants

Beyond the Screen:
Building Typographic Skills Through Tactile Play

WHEN: Friday, August 08, 2025
WHERE: TBD
TIME: 8:30a–11:30a
LEADER: Stephanie Carpenter

While digital tools dominate contemporary design, working with physical type offers an unparalleled way to reconnect with the fundamentals of typography. In this hands-on workshop, Stephanie Carpenter shares practical strategies for integrating tactile exercises into classrooms, workshops, studios, and personal practice with no traditional print shop required. Drawing on years of experience teaching college courses, leading letterpress workshops, and working with students and designers of all skill levels, Stephanie will guide participants through adaptable, low-cost activities using simple materials like paper type, hand-built tools, and collaborative methods. Together, you’ll explore letterforms, layout, modularity, and materiality in ways that sharpen technical skills and unlock creative thinking. Participants will leave with usable ideas to inspire students, energize design teams, or reimagine their own typographic process.

Stephanie Carpenter is a letterpress printer, educator, and graphic designer based in Wisconsin. She has worked at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum since 2011, where she is now Program Officer. Stephanie helps maintain the world’s largest collection of 1.5 million pieces of wood type, leads programs like New Impressions juried exhibition and Really Big Prints steamroller event, and teaches workshops. She creates posters, installations, and artists’ books using vintage type and hand-carved blocks. Stephanie has taught at St. Norbert College, East Carolina University, and Silver Lake College, and has presented at Wayzgoose, Design Week Fort Wayne, and Interrobang. She holds a BA from the University of Saint Francis and an MFA from Indiana University Bloomington.
Instagram

COST: $125
Limited to 10 participants

SATURDAY

Type Crit

WHEN: Saturday, August 09, 2025
WHERE: TBD
TIME: 8:30a–11:30a
LEADERS: Glenda Bellarosa, John Downer, Gen Ramírez

The famous Type Crit gives designers a critique on their in progress typeface. Included with the Type Crit, Glenda will also do font quality assurance for the designer if they have binary data (OTF/TTF/VF) for testing. This QA includes a preliminary technical check of the fonts in Font Bakery and an explanation of the results and how to resolve them. Glenda will share some resources and tools that will help bring their fonts to OpenType Specifications and/or meet basic user expectations. Designers should email Glenda binary data at least 24 hours before the workshop.

Glenda Bellarosa is font developer and font engineer, currently contracting with Adobe Fonts as their Library Administrator. She also runs Maria Glenda Bellarosa LLC. Her clients include The Type Founders, Contrast Foundry, and Sharp Type. Glenda has been working in type for more than three decades. She started out hinting TrueType fonts at Monotype and Font Bureau. While at Monotype, she gained extensive knowledge in both writing OpenType code and the intricacies of complex South Asian scripts, Arabic, and symbolic scripts. Looking to help support the development and preservation of minority scripts and languages, Glenda joined Unicode in 2024. She is as passionate about producing functionally correct and efficient fonts as she is about doing the daily Wordle.
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Mr. Downer is a sign painter, a typeface designer, and an educator. He has written about type and type history for various publications and is widely known as a perceptive type critic. His typefaces have been published by Bitstream, Font Bureau, Emigre, House Industries, and Design Lab. Among his most popular type designs are Iowan Old Style (on Apple Books and iOS 7+), Roxy, Ironmonger, and the ubiquitous food and beverage branding favorite, Brothers.   A native of the Pacific Northwest, a region of the US with a rich history of sign painting and hand-lettering, Mr. Downer was first introduced to commercial pen & brush lettering in the 1960s in junior high school. He began an apprenticeship in a sign painting shop at age 18. He holds BA, MA, and MFA degrees in art.
Instagram

Gen Ramírez is a typeface designer, graphic designer, calligrapher and sign-painter from Guadalajara, Mexico. His strong interest and passion for brushes and letterforms developed at a young age as he was taught the mastery of sign-painting in his father’s workshop. It later led him to graduate from TypeMedia at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague as well as completing both the Type@Cooper Extended program in San Francisco and Condensed program in New York.

He teaches calligraphy, sign-painting, and type design workshops, and leads Letrastica Festival, a conference in Guadalajara. With strong roots in an organic approach to letterforms, his work focuses on embracing both the analog and digital dimensions of design.
Instagram

COST: FREE
Limited to 10 participants