Cooper Type Diary 1: The First Week
Type@Cooper is the first postgraduate typeface design certification program in North America. It was created as a collaboration between the Type Director’s Club of New York and The Cooper Union. The Cooper Union is one of the few free universities in the United States, and has educated design luminaries including Lou Dorfsman, Herb Lubalin, Milton Glaser, and Ellen Lupton. Type@Cooper provides weekly type design and history courses, weekend workshops, and guest lectures.
I will be writing occasional articles for TDC about the Type@Cooper program. You can look forward to reading about what we have been studying accompanied with photos of our work in progress.
Our first week began with Alexander Tochilovsky lecturing about the development of the latin alphabet. His course focuses on how tools and technology impact letterforms, and with a class full of type nerds, lectures are constantly interrupted for spirited discussions about the history of type.
The second class was Jesse Ragan’s. Jesse teaches typeface design techniques, and he opened up with a long discussion about the meat, flesh, and skin of letters. From there we jumped right into drawing —with pens on paper.
To keep us on our toes our first weekend workshop was two days of calligraphy led by Karen Charatan. Using a prodigious supply of Zig calligraphy markets we filled one 18″×”24″ page after another. Cara DiEdwardo provided a second calligrapher to critique our work. Thankfully most of us had some experience with broad-nib writing, allowing us to get through blackletter, italic, humanist minuscules, and Roman capitals in a single weekend.
Our second week kicked off with another history lecture, this one about early type manufacturing. We discussed punchcutting, matrix justification, and molds. This provided a perfect segue into Jesse Ragan’s punchcutting demonstration. Somehow we found time to cram in a critique of our first batch of drawings—but with eighteen students, none of us were surprised when class ran late.
Karen Charatan demonstrates the italic “a”.
Two days of writing requires constant caffination.
Jesse Ragan demonstrates the ancient art of sculpting letters from steel punches.
Students critique the first round of homework in the clock tower of The Cooper Union.