Have you ever wanted to build a tower made of letters? Wouldn’t it be fun to knock it over and watch all the glyphs crash into each other? Or what about an entire paragraph of text that can float like helium balloons? And what if you took a really nice shallow depth-of-field photograph of those balloons as they flew away into an orange sunset?

This class will focus on building and animating typography in three dimensions using the open-source program Blender and ST2, an extension that brings high-quality — and cutting-edge — typography to Blender.

We’ll begin with an introduction to Blender: making objects, moving them around in three dimensions, creating simple lighting setups, getting the virtual camera in just the right spot with just the right aperture and focal length. And then we’ll jump into typography with ST2: choosing fonts, animating variable fonts, making words crash into each other, filling letters with (virtual) helium, throwing letters into (virtual) pools of water, reflecting letters in (virtual) funhouse mirrors — the options are endless.

In later classes, we’ll unlock procedural workflows in Blender, using both their Geometry Nodes visual programming language and Python for text-based scripting.

And for the sixth session, everyone will present a short typographic film of your own making. Length is up to you!

What do you need to take this class? Just a laptop, an interest in graphic design, and a willingness to spend some time learning a somewhat odd program. (Blender is famous for its quirky — but powerful — interface.) Blender and ST2 are completely free and open source, but it would help if your laptop is fairly recent and/or powerful. Blender runs on almost all computers on Mac, Linux, and Windows, but it can get into trouble on older computers, and is in general more fun to use on computers that have some solid processing power. Here’s a page detailing the minimum system requirements.

We’ll also cover putting the finishing touches on your animations in a video editing program like Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, though the exact program you use is totally up to you.

Registration opens on January 6, 2026. Join our mailing list for updates and announcements.