This lecture series invites new and established voices to share their stories, knowledge, and ideas with the community. This spring, we spotlight community-driven creative spaces and multidisciplinary design practices, highlighting how these groups foster collaboration, social impact, and cultural dialogue within their communities and beyond.

Join us as we explore the role of design in building and sustaining community, and how hybrid creative practices are shaping the future of creative work.

Type Electives Virtual Lecture Series:

Ink, Type, and Territories: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Community Design

Buena Gráfica Social Studio is a Providence-based, interdisciplinary design practice that treats visual communication as social infrastructure. The studio works at the intersection of graphic design, printmaking, and community organizing to support health, environmental, and cultural initiatives.

Their projects span bilingual public health campaigns, wayfinding systems, large-scale murals, and experimental publications. Grounded in print-based practices and working across spatial and digital platforms, Buena Gráfica approaches typography as a tactile, spatial medium.

The studio’s work is deeply collaborative, developed with community partners, educators, and cultural institutions. Through initiatives like the Gráfica Latina archive, Buena Gráfica also intervenes in design history, foregrounding Latin American and Latinx graphic production that has long been sidelined in Eurocentric narratives. Across media, scales, and contexts, the studio uses ink and type to map relationships between people and place, imagining design as a multidisciplinary practice of community care and collective memory.

Send us your questions through our Instagram @typeelectives

The event will be hosted online via Zoom.

We look forward to having you with us!

Buena Gráfica Social Studio

Buena Gráfica Social Studio is an interdisciplinary communication design studio centered in community building through design. Through the lenses of community engagement, graphic design, printmaking, and public space interventions, Buena Gráfica’s work examines the design practice as a platform for multilingual and multicultural communication at multiple scales. Buena Gráfica is run by Tatiana Gómez and José Menéndez, whose work has been recognized by Graphis, the Society of Typographic Arts, the Type Director’s Club, Dezeen, and Graphic Design USA.

They work together on the research project Gráfica Latina (graficalatina.com), an online, print, and mobile archive of Latin American posters. They collaborate on the curation, acquisition, archival, dissemination, exhibition, and programming of the project.

José is an Assistant Professor in Graphic Design and Architecture at Northeastern University. He has an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MS in Marine Science Communication from the University of Rhode Island, and a BS in Landscape Architecture from Temple University.

Tatiana is an Associate Professor in Communication Design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Design from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Instagram: @buenagraficasocialstudio, @graficalatina_, @atomenendez, @tatitag