Where type designers are made
Six programmes shape almost everyone working in type design in 2026. All six are small. Most are slow by design.
KABK Type & Media, Den Haag. MA founded September 2002. Roughly twelve students per year. Head: Erik van Blokland. Alumni include Andy Clymer, Antonio Cavedoni, Stephen Nixon, Frederik Berlaen — most of whom are now teaching the people who will teach the next cohort. The feedback loop is short enough to be visible.
Reading MATD, University of Reading. Launched 1999. Programme director Gerry Leonidas. Field trips to Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp and Museum Meermanno in The Hague. The late Gerard Unger taught six weeks a year for two decades. Leonidas on what the programme is:
“The MATD is founded on the idea that typeface design exists at the junction of design practice, a historical and technological environment, and a cultural context.”
Type@Cooper, New York City. Founded 2010, co-founded by Cooper Union and the TDC. Runs the Typographics festival each June, which has become the main annual gathering for the field in North America.
ECAL Master Type Design, Lausanne. Launched 2016. Uniquely, it is two years — most others are one. Lecturers across the years include Matthew Carter, Bruno Maag, Dafi Kühne. The extra year shows in the work.
Type West at the Letterform Archive, San Francisco. Independent from October 2018, after a 2015–18 partnership with Cooper Union. The archive itself is the curriculum advantage: students study original drawings, not facsimiles. The difference between looking at a reproduction and holding the actual thing is the difference between reading a review and seeing the film.
ANRT Nancy. A French state-funded research lab, originally founded by Jack Lang in 1985, paused 2006–2013, and reborn under Thomas Huot-Marchand on the ARTEM campus. The only programme on the list with a research mandate rather than a vocational one. It produces designers who ask why the conventions exist, not just how to use them.
The pattern across all six is the same: small cohorts, slow projects, a heavy reading list, and at least one alumni network dense enough that a graduate’s first job offer probably comes through it.
None of them produces many graduates per year. None of them is meant to. Type design is slow work, and the programmes that produce it well have decided not to apologise for that.