Typography

Typography is a foundations course that takes the building blocks of written language seriously — letter, word, line, paragraph, page, screen. We begin with the anatomy of a single glyph and end with multi-page editorial systems and responsive type on the web. Each week pairs a focused exercise with a short historical or theoretical reading: Gutenberg next to Bringhurst, the Bauhaus next to the variable font specification, Wim Crouwel next to the contemporary type designers reshaping non-Latin scripts. Students learn to set type with intention — measuring, comparing, and revising — and to defend their decisions in critique. The course is hands-on: there are weekly making assignments, twice-weekly critiques, and a final project in which students design and produce a small printed publication of their own writing. Along the way we discuss accessibility, multilingual typesetting, and the ways digital tools both expand and constrain typographic choice. By the end of the term students are expected to articulate the difference between a good page and a careful one, and to recognize that typography is less about taste than about responsibility to a reader.