Drawing Type in the Noordzij Tradition
with
Hannes Famira
This 10-week workshop introduces the process of developing a typeface, from hand drawn sketches to a digitally drafted lowercase alphabet. Through a practice-based approach, participants will take the time to build a deep understanding of letterform construction by drawing, analyzing, and refining forms before translating them into digital outlines.
The course is grounded in the Noordzij tradition of type design, using manual sketching as a tool for understanding how letters are built. Rather than copying existing forms, participants will investigate the structural logic of the Latin lowercase: Why are some parts of a letter thicker than others? How do proportion, contrast, and shared details create a coherent typeface? Through sketching, we will study the underlying skeleton of letterforms and learn to construct consistent shapes in both the Expansion and Translation contrast models.
Beginning with loose exploratory sketches, participants will gradually develop increasingly refined drawings that serve as the original artwork for digitization. In the second half of the course, these drawings will be brought into RoboFont, where participants will learn the fundamentals of digital type design, including Bézier drawing techniques and digital drafting workflows.
Each class combines demonstrations, guided exercises, and dedicated studio work. Because type design is learned through sustain practice, participants should expect to spend at least four hours per week working independently between sessions.
By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a digitally drafted lowercase Roman alphabet, a good understanding of lowercase letter construction, confidence sketching and analyzing type, and a solid foundation in digital type design workflows.
This is a foundational course for designers and anyone with a strong curiosity about typeface design. No previous experience with type design or lettering is required.
Required Materials:
- black Sharpies of different thickness
- black 0.3 mm micro(n) fineliner pen
- pencil (HB mechanical or standard #2 with sharpener)
- eraser
- 12” or longer metal ruler
- exacto or scalpel knife
- presto correction pen
- Canson Vidalon Vellum 50 sheets 9 x 12”
- board and tape will be supplied by instructor (add $10)
- Apple laptop w/Mac OS10.6 min — [needed from week 5 on]
- A free one-year student license for RoboFont will be provided
About Hannes Famira
Hannes Famira is founding principal of FamiraFonts. He is a graphic designer, a type designer and a teacher of both disciplines. After 20 years in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland he now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
His library of retail typefaces is available from Adobe Fonts, Type Network and I Love Typography. You can see work in progress at Dribbble. Companies like Céline, Helmut Lang, GoDaddy, Mansur Gavriel and Theory have commissioned custom tailored logo and corporate typeface solutions. Most recently Hannes drew a typeface for the opening titles of the AMC television show Interview With The Vampire.
Hannes’ understanding of type comes mostly out of his Dutch design education at the Royal Academy in The Hague (KABK). With a painter for a mother and neo-modernist architect for a father his earliest influences are based in a love for Scandinavian and traditional Japanese design. Combining the freedom of painting with the structured thinking of architecture seems to have quite naturally led him to type design at the center of his creative work.
After having worked at Meta Design, at the Buro Petr van Blokland and at House Industries Hannes started his own design studio Das Kombinat in 1999. He added Kombinat-Typefounders in 2001 and renamed it FamiraFonts in 2016.
An ongoing practice of teaching type has been the most formative influence on Hannes’ thinking since his years as a student at KABK. He has been teaching in the Type@Cooper Extended and Condensed programs at the The Cooper Union since January 2011. Hannes is teaching type design in the Masters Program at MICA. He held the 2025 Stuckeman Professorship in Interdisciplinary Design at Penn State University. Hannes also taught various typography and type design classes at the Basel School for Design in Switzerland, at The Cooper Union New York City, SVA the School of Visual Arts, the UArts in Philadelphia, the New Jersey City University, the Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaft und Kunst Hildesheim/Holzminden/Göttingen, the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Rutgers University and the City University of New York.