Workshop Description
The letters in an alphabet are a connected set of shapes rather than isolated drawings. This workshop offers a space for exploring letters through the patterns they create: forms with structure and rhythm that intersect, combine, and sometimes contradict one another. It treats the alphabet as a landscape where a letter is never alone but constantly shaped by its relationship to others. Through analog and digital exercises, participants will experiment with how letters behave together and develop coherence and character within a typographic system.

By the end of the workshop, attendees will:

> Develop a full alphabet as a connected set of letterforms

> Understand basic principles of typographic systems, including consistency, structure, spacing, and internal logic.

> Gain tools for evaluating how letters work together across an alphabet rather than as individual drawings.

Who Should Attend
Open to all levels:

> Students and professionals in graphic design, typography, or type design who want to think more deeply about how letterforms work as a system.

> Anyone interested in alphabet structure, pattern, and experimentation, from early-stage designers to more experienced practitioners looking to sharpen their process.

Materials

Please bring a laptop. All other materials will be provided by HMCT.

Schedule
10 AM – 12 PM: Drawing letterforms by hand
12 PM – 1 PM: Lunch break

1 PM – 4 PM: Digitizing and refining the alphabet as a system

Light snacks and refreshments will be provided.

Meet your instructor

Fer Cozzi is a type designer from Buenos Aires whose work grows from long study, steady practice, and a clear curiosity about how letters behave. She studied at the University of Buenos Aires and completed the CDT Type Design Specialization, later expanding her focus through programs dedicated to Devanagari, Cyrillic, Python for type design, and calligraphy. She works independently and collaborates with studios internationally on custom type, extensions, wordmarks, and typographic consultancy.

Alongside her practice, she has built a substantial teaching presence. She is a professor in the Master in Type Design at the University of Buenos Aires, teaches in Type West Online at Letterform Archive, and leads workshops across Latin America, the United States, and Europe. What makes her teaching compelling is the blend of research and practice she brings into the room. Students who work with her get insight into how contemporary type is made, tested, revised, and understood within a larger cultural context.

She has been part of key studies on Latin American typography and has given talks at ATypI, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, and numerous design festivals, often sharing her process with a mix of rigor and openness. Her projects have received recognition from Gerard Unger Scholarship juries, Modern Cyrillic, Founder Type Design Competition, Sello Buen Diseño, Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces, and Tipos Latinos.

Fer is this year’s HMCT Typographer-in-Residence and will be working on-site at HMCT between February and March developing a project that explores the Latin alphabet as a system of expressive forms. Her research looks at how letters take shape through reading, convention, and gesture, and will result in a variable typographic system shaped by these investigations.