Type Electives is built by all the people who contribute their time and energy towards supporting students and community members. We thank our faculty, guest speakers, and contributors, and everyone involved.

James Plattner is a designer/artist currently based in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati where he studied art and design, and studied type at Type@Cooper. He works in lettering, type, and branding.

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James Plattner

Designer & Artist

Fabiola Mejía (she/her) is an independent type designer from Costa Rica. In 2017, she completed the Type@Cooper Condensed Program in NYC, and in 2019, she received an MA in Typeface Design from TypeMedia, in The Netherlands. Besides working remotely with Dinamo Typefaces, she recently founded <a href="https://supercontinente.com">SUPERCONTINENTE</a>, a platform dedicated to her type design practice and collaborative graphic explorations.

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Fabiola Mejía

Type Designer

Silas Munro (he/they) is an artist, designer, writer, curator, and partner of <a href="https://www.polymode.studio/">Polymode</a>, a studio that leads the edge of contemporary graphic design for clients in the cultural sphere. Collaborations include the City of Los Angeles, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, David Kordansky Gallery, MoMA, and MOCA. He is a curator and author of Strikethrough: Typographic Messages of Protest that opened at Letterform Archive in 2022. Munro’s writing appears in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Munro expanded this research as a co-author of the first BIPOC centered Design History course: Black Design in America: African Americans and the African Diaspora in Graphic Design, which will be published in book form. Munro holds an MFA from CalArts and a BFA from RISD. Munro is Founding Faculty and Co-Chair for the MFA in Graphic Design at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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Silas Munro

Artist, Poet, Graphic Designer, Writer, & Educator

Libbie Bischoff (she/her) is a California-based type designer. After graduating Type West in 2020, she opened her own type foundry, <a href="http://typedunord.com/">Type Du Nord</a>. She started by making 52 fonts in one year and is now focusing on building her type library.

Libbie Bischoff

<a href="https://lynneyun.com">Lynne Yun</a> (she/her) is a Korean typeface designer and educator fluidly connecting the seams between calligraphy, type design, and generative typography. She is an alumna of the Type@Cooper Extended program, School for Poetic Computation, and ITP at New York University. She has previously taught for institutions such as Type@Cooper, Parsons School of Design, and The Letterform Archive. She currently runs <a href="https://spacetypeco.com">Space Type</a>, an NYC studio operating at the intersection of type and technology.

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Lynne Yun

Type Designer, Educator & Technologist

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/theilonabrand/">Ilona</a> (they/them) is an artist, extrovert, teacher and technologist who sees their work as love notes to themself, the world, and others. They work across mediums using music, poetry, code, drawing, and their jewish practice as tools of expression both publicly and privately. These days they are particularly interested in trans narratives of liberation, judaism as a site of ritual, visibility on and offline, and how we present ourselves and our work to the world.

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Ilona Brand

Artist & Technologist

<a href="https://www.mdholakia.com/">Meghna Dholakia</a> (she/her) is a designer and artist fascinated by individual, collective, and geologic narratives of transformation. She is interested in how communities come together, commune, and collapse. Currently, she is a designer at The New York Times helping people think more clearly about how to work together.

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Meghna Dholakia

Lauren Williams (she/her) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher, and educator. She works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power.
Through her creative practice and research, she often investigates Blackness, identity, bodiliness, and social fictions to examine how racism is felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions. Themes of trust and the transformations enabled by social engagement shape both her approaches—collaboration, facilitation, collective production—and the questions she examines surrounding power and oppression, social relations, and social movements. Lauren has taught design + interdisciplinary studios and intensives at the College for Creative Studies, ArtCenter College of Design, CalArts and elsewhere. In the past, she has managed programs and policy aimed at cultivating economic justice at Prosperity Now in DC. Going forward, she's finding ways to align her capacities with revolutionary movements that build toward different socioeconomic systems entirely and usher in new dimensions of power and freedom altogether.
Her work can be found at <a href="http://www.williamslaurenm.com/">williamslaurenm.com</a>.

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Lauren Williams

Designer / Researcher

Schessa Garbutt (they/them) is a Belizean-American creative polymath and founder of <a href="https://www.firebrand.house/">Firebrand Creative</a> House based in Inglewood, CA. Their design practice focuses on brand identity and UI/UX design for social impact initiatives and mission-driven organizations. Garbutt is also an essayist (recently in The Black Experience in Design anthology) and lecturer, speaking on diversifying design history and co-design practices at universities and organizations such as IDEO, SF Design Week, MICA, Where are the Black Designers, and Adobe's Wireframe podcast. Garbutt holds a B.A. in Design from the University of Southern California, and a certificate in Type Design from Type West.

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Schessa Garbutt

Designer & Afrofuturist

<a href="https://kyeh.me">Kevin</a> (he/him) is a partner at <a href="https://spacetypeco.com">Space Type</a>, a Brooklyn based type studio that operates at the intersection of type, design, and technology. Kevin has a background in computer vision, graphics and robotic learning, and holds an MS in computer science and film studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He also works at Nava PBC, where he partners with government agencies to build simple and reliable public digital services.

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Profile Image - Kevin Yeh

Kevin Yeh

Developer & Technologist

<a href="https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins/people/rathna-ramanathan-head-of-college">Rathna Ramanathan</a> (she/they) is a typographer, practice design researcher and academic known for her expertise in intercultural communication and alternative publishing practices. She is Head of Central Saint Martins, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of the Arts London and a Reader in Intercultural Communication. For the past thirty years, Rathna has led research-driven, intercultural, multi-platform graphic communication design projects primarily in the Global South, all fuelled by a love for, and life-long interest in typography and languages, and a belief in communication as a fundamental human right.

Rathna Ramanathan

Graphic Design, Educator and Researcher

<a href="https://www.instagram.com/genramirez">Gen Ramírez</a> (he/him) is a typeface designer, graphic designer, calligrapher and sign-painter from Guadalajara, Mexico. His strong interest and passion for brushes and letterforms developed since a young age as he was taught 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 Type@Cooper Extended program in San Francisco and Condensed 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. He loves adding a dash of code in there to spice things up too!

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Gen Ramírez

Typeface Designer, Graphic Designer, Calligrapher, and Sign-Painter

<a href="http://www.instagram.com/davidjonwalker">David</a> (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at Austin Peay State University and is currently pursuing a MFA in Graphic Design with a focus on letterform and typography at Yale School of Art. He is also principal of Rhealistic Design, a design consultancy that is active locally and nationally. He is a designer and lettering artist, who explores the relationship of type placed with images of people—and how this can sometimes be loving, at other times aggressive, etc. He will also share his process of exploring these relationships.

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David Jon Walker

Designer & Lettering Artist

<a href="https://beatrizl.com/">Beatriz</a> (she/her) is a designer, typographer, and educator exploring how technology can push typography to exist at the intersection of the physical and digital world. She teaches interaction design at Parsons and was formerly a design director at Sunday Afternoon.
Originally on the path to becoming a mechanical engineer, Beatriz shifted to graphic design as her involvement in immigrant rights activism exposed her to the power of visual communication. Her work has been recognized by the ADC, TDC, Communication arts, and PRINT. Some of her clients include ESPN, Target, and NPR.

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Beatriz Lozano

Designer, Typographer, and Educator

Kel Troughton is a type designer, graffiti writer, and educator living in Oakland CA. He works for Letterform Archive as a graffiti consultant, previously worked at Monotype, and studied at Type@Cooper West. His new foundry Overlap Type is focused on creating new and experimental display type.

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Kel Troughton

<a href="https://juankafka.com">Juan Villanueva</a> (he/him) is a Peruvian typeface designer and educator in New York City. Juan is a Sr. Type Designer at Monotype. A graduate of the Type@Cooper Extended program, he has taught for institutions such as Type@Cooper, The City College of New York, and The Letterform Archive. Juan is also the founder of <a href="https://typecritcrew.com">Type Crit Crew</a>, an initiative to make type design education more accessible and inclusive.

People