Type West is a type design certificate program hosted by Letterform Archive. Throughout the year, students learned the tools and techniques necessary to create original typefaces, from sketch to font. The students engaged in in-depth, hands-on instruction in type design history, theory and fundamentals. The program is tailored to the needs of recent graduates, working designers, and other professionals who interact with type and typography regularly but would like to deepen their knowledge in a supportive and challenging academic environment.

The Class of 2021 was the first of the program to go 100% online, and the largest class so far with 19 graduating students. Most students logged in from California in the early evening while those across the globe committed to attending in the middle of the night or early morning. Some even managed to move across countries during the course of the program. Reflected is a distinct and varied community of typefaces.

The class would like to thank everyone who was a pillar of support during this past year: family, friends, and everyone who cheered us on in this adventure. We would love to give a special thank you to our teachers, TAs, guest lecturers, guest critics, and workshops instructors. Without every single one of you, our projects would not be what they are. Thank you for sharing what you know:

Grendl Löfkvist, Graham Bradley, Kel Troughton, Lynne Yun, James Edmondson, Libbie Bischoff, Lizzy Ha, Rob Saunders, Gen Ramírez, Juan Villanueva, Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer, Nina Stössinger, Florence Fu, Tommi Sharp, Calder Hansen, Kevin Barrett, Agyei Archer, Miguel Reyes, Jeremy Mickel, Tobias Frere-Jones, Stephen Coles, Gabriel Amijai Benderski Perez, Dina Benbrahim, Sofie Beier, Neebinnaukzhik Southall, Lucille Tenazas, Stefan Ellmer, Sandra García, Dafne Martínez, Mónica Munguía, Iyad Naja, Nicholas Benson, Lisa Huang, Thomas Phinney, Applied Design Works, Bahia Shehab, Haytham Nawar, Lauren Hart, Johnny Avots-Smith, Priscilla Zaccalini, Kate Long, The Archive Staff, & SFPL.

The supporting font is Duplicate Sans by Commercial Type. Special thanks to the makers of Glyphs and Robofont.

Theka

Theka is a casual Latin display type family that was originally inspired by hand-painted municipal signs and ads seen everywhere in rural South India, especially on roadside walls. As most of the signs are in Malayalam, Theka was an experiment to see how a type “recipe” derived from Malayalam lettering could apply to a Latin type design.

Throughout the project, I worked to capture the lively and expressive letterforms of the Malayalam sign reference and to follow (to an extent) the brush logic used in these signs, while making departures where necessary. What started out as a fun exploratory exercise gradually found its legs into the original design Theka is today – one that aims to celebrate the rich visual culture in which I am lucky enough to be surrounded with, and immersed in, every day.

Jamie Otelsberg

Jamie Otelsberg is a type designer based between Los Angeles, California; Kerala, South India; and Essen, Germany. Wherever she is in the world you can usually find her with a cup of coffee in her hand, and reading or studying something new. She currently works at OH no Type Co. in Oakland, California.

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