Thinking with Type Workshop
with
Ellen Lupton
Explore the fundamentals of typographic styling and layout while drawing inspiration from spectacular pieces in the Letterform Archive. During the workshop, you will develop a branding system for a fictional product or organization. Building outward from a core typographic mark, you will create a palette of elements and apply your system to diverse content. The end result will be an 8-page “standards manual” inspired by modern masterworks of corporate identity—from NASA and the Finnish railway to Kentucky Fried Chicken. This intensive, hands-on workshop will challenge you to build your skills, from choosing and combining type to crafting a typographic hierarchy and building a grid.
This class is created for designers and students with a grasp of the basics and a desire to flex their typographic muscles. We will be working in Adobe InDesign, so a recent version (CS4 or later) of the application is required. The course builds on Ellen Lupton’s best-selling book Thinking with Type (2010).
About Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, and educator. Her books include Design Is Storytelling, Graphic Design Thinking, Health Design Thinking, and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. The third edition of her bestselling book Thinking with Type launches in March 2024. She teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA), where she serves as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair. She is Curator Emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, where her exhibitions included Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision.