In 2020, HMCT welcomed Joshua Trees, Yvan Martinez, and Krister Olsson as our Typographers-in-Residence. Based in London, the trio has an established collaborative practice that engages with publishing as a mode of social inquiry and cultural intervention, using design to question how typography operates within systems of communication and collective experience.

During their residency, they developed the first phase of Public Foundry, conceived as the first type foundry powered by the public through artificial intelligence. The project gathers, archives, and reconstructs letterforms that articulate human presence—socially, culturally, and politically—reviving typographic expressions that risk disappearance while proposing speculative continuities between past, present, and future forms.

Their research considers how the digital era has simultaneously democratized access to typography and consolidated the discipline of type design within specialized, often exclusionary frameworks. Public Foundry seeks to counter this by positioning typography as a site of shared authorship and public memory, inviting collective participation in the making of letterforms that resist homogenization and the erasure of local visual languages under processes such as gentrification and globalization.

Throughout their time at HMCT, Trees, Martinez, and Olsson extended these questions through public dialogue, inviting students, designers, and community members to reflect on the social dimensions of typographic practice. Their residency exemplified HMCT’s commitment to advancing critical engagement with typography as both language and artifact—an evolving field through which design functions as a record of cultural identity and a means of reimagining how communication can operate within public life.

Joshua Trees, Yvan Martinez, and Krister Olsson are designers, researchers and educators based in London, who collectively served as our Typographers-in-Residence this year. For over twenty years, they have been collaboratively exploring publishing as a mode of social enquiry, cultural intervention and public engagement. Their work has been distributed and exhibited widely.

In 2019, Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence program granted Trees, Martinez and Olsson a Focused Research Award to build Public Foundry, the first type foundry powered by the public using artificial intelligence.

Although the digital revolution is commonly thought to have democratized the field of typography by making computer fonts publicly available, digital typeface design remains an esoteric practice. At the same time, public lettering and signage are being erased and homogenised through gentrification and globalisation. Public Foundry aims to address this paradox by serving as a tool and resource for collecting, archiving and constructing letterforms that express and embody the human voice — socially, culturally and politically: letterforms that reflect our collective and personal identities, ideologies and memories; letterforms that revive and reinvent endangered typographies to perform alternative pasts and speculative futures.