Adriana, Arlyn, and Xicheng share not only a passion for type but also a relentless drive to learn and contribute to the field. Adriana discovered her love for type at a young age, and despite limited resources, she pursued self-education—taking every course on fonts she could find. This led her to a close-knit community of fellow type designers. Her typeface, Tlayuda, is currently in development and is an ambitious variable typeface with a delightfully eccentric flair. 

Arlyn came to type later in her career as a multidisciplinary designer but hasn’t stopped creating since. Her prolific output often incorporates her second passion—traditional cuisine—resulting in whimsical, beautifully executed typefaces inspired by her everyday surroundings. 

From the moment we learned of Xicheng, she impressed us. She has completed her Master’s and is now pursuing a PhD in Typeface Design at the University of Reading. Beyond her impressive academic accomplishments, Xicheng’s dedication to digitizing Tangut, an extinct script from China, to preserve its cultural heritage is remarkable. 

We’re thrilled to introduce these three talented type designers, who are poised to make incredible contributions to the field.

Xicheng Yang is a typeface designer from China, completed her Masters in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, UK, and is now a PhD student in the same department. Her research focuses on developing digital typefaces for the Tangut script, an extinct script used primarily in 11th-13th century China. She has redesigned Noto Serif Tangut for Google Fonts at @liuzhao_studio. She won awards for her typeface designs, including New York TDC awards and Tokyo TDC for AraTangut, and New York TDC Young Ones awards for Lyean. She also presents her research at conferences, promoting the cultural heritage of Tangut and other minority scripts in China.

M. S.: How does your background and upbringing shape who you are? How does your origin story shape your approach or drive to design?

Xicheng Yang: My grandfather introduced me to the beauty of Chinese characters through calligraphy at a young age, which gave me a deep appreciation for Chinese cultural heritage. Growing up in such a culturally rich background made me feel proud of China’s culture. After further study and typeface projects I discovered a largely undeveloped amazing Chinese cultural heritage. There are so many scripts are or were used by different groups of people in China. But there’s not enough effort made in developing digital typefaces for them. As someone from the younger generation, with a strong connection to the digital environment, I feel a great responsibility to preserve these scripts by bringing them into the digital era. This drive to preserve and promote cultural heritage is at the core of my design philosophy.

M. S.: You have a rich background in type design and are now going for your Ph.D in the field! Tell us about your academic journey and what you are now pursuing at Reading.

Xicheng Yang: After completing my undergraduate studies in graphic design in Beijing, I knew I wanted to dive deeper into type design. That’s when I decided to pursue a Master’s at the University of Reading, which has a strong course focusing on typeface design. My experience there broadened my understanding of typeface development across different scripts. Now I’m in my second year of my Ph.D., where my research focuses on the Tangut script. I’m developing new digital typefaces for this extinct script, making them functional for modern usage while staying true to their historical origins. The research explores the process of inventive re-imagining and adaptation, enabling new uses of the script. Through historical and typographic analysis, as well as practical investigations, it aims to offer a method or model to support documentation and enhance the understanding of revival projects for extinct scripts. It provides a framework for working with archival forms to inspire new uses in digital spaces. Additionally, this project bridges the gap between existing linguistic and historical research and the design of letterforms for extinct scripts, providing a model for interdisciplinary collaboration. It fills the gap of lacking detailed documentation for the revival process of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) scripts or other sinoform scripts (not only Chinese characters but also scripts influenced by them and individual Chinese characters incorporated into other writing systems), offering essential resources to support other researchers and designers in this field.

M. S.: If you haven’t mentioned it already, tell us about your revival project with Tangut. Why is it important to research and revitalize ancient and other, as you put it, neglected scripts?

Xicheng Yang: My Tangut revival project will start soon as part of my Ph.D. Tangut typefaces are currently used mainly in academic papers, and scholars in different countries have different preferences in terms of font style. Tangut was created in the 11th century and was used for about 300 years, so it didn’t originally have styles like SongTi that are common today. However, there are some Tangut typefaces in SongTi style, which brought up a discussion on social media about: whether a new style should be applied to the Tangut script, and whether this is the behaviour of one culture being forced upon another. Therefore in my project, I will explore the style of Tangut typefaces and develop new digital typefaces suitable for different typographic environments, such as multi-script settings, varying text lengths, and both horizontal and vertical writing direction’s layouts. In 2022, together with my MATD (MA Typeface Design) classmate Kaito Osawa at the University of Reading, we've developed a custom Tangut typeface, AraTangut, for the paper of Japanese Tangut scholar Shintaro Arakawa. It creates a unique and ethnic flavour between Mincho (SongTi) style and Tangut calligraphy, which will be included in my Ph.D. research.

It is important because while there are scholars studying the script itself, there hasn’t been much effort to create functional, modern digital typefaces for it. Reviving extinct scripts like Tangut helps preserve cultural heritage. These scripts aren’t just historical artefacts—they can have a place in modern design and academic research. Additionally, it also provides a framework for reviving other endangered or extinct scripts, such as Khitan scripts or Old Uyghur script, by documenting the process of translating historical forms into digital media. By designing a Tangut typeface, I’m contributing to a broader movement of bringing neglected scripts back to life, ensuring they remain part of our shared history.

Arlyn has been doing branding, graphic design, web, ux, and lettering for more than a decade. She has designed for clients big and small, from beloved local small businesses to Hawaiian Airlines. She recently graduated from Type@Cooper's Condensed Type Program with a certificate in typeface design. At Cooper Union she juggled side trips to bakeries and neighborhood adventures while working on her typeface project for school. She often smuggled bites of pastries in between glyph-making and type critiques.

Born in the Philippines and raised in Hawai’i, Arlyn hopes to contribute meaningfully to the type community in the ways she can as an Ilokano Fil-Am woman designer from Kalihi. She aims to create representation for people like herself, advocate for better language support and the design needs of her community, create thoughtfully crafted custom type for local Hawai’i brands, and share her learnings about design in her writing.

M. S.: When referring to your passion you say “the stoke is real”, or may we suggest “the stroke is real”, How has your passion pushed you toward your dream of becoming a type designer?

Arlyn Ramos: Hahaha, yeah, one of my bosses once said, “the stoke is real,” when making an observation about me. I do have a fire—a hunger and a curiosity. Maybe I don’t know how to be any less stoked, because it’s fun in and of itself to explore, experiment, and make things. It’s good to be excited about the work you’re doing and the process itself. It helps you stay motivated especially when you don’t feel good enough, have trouble flowing, or experience failures.

Maybe “stoke” is hope, too. Many times during my creative career I was completely lost and questioning what I was doing. But there was always at least a little bit of fight left inside, and I’m so glad I didn’t give up on whatever this was supposed to turn out to be. Although I always felt at home playing with letterforms, I actually didn’t know I wanted to be a type designer until recently. Then this domino effect happened, starting with learning the Glyphs app through Victor Baltus, then taking Juan Villanueva's Type Electives class and loving it, and finally, going to New York this past summer to study typeface design at Cooper Union’s Condensed Type program. Years of keeping up the stoke, passionately learning and creating, while searching, praying, and listening to life’s little nudges have led me here.

M. S.: Tell us why it is important to advocate for greater language support in Latin typefaces, such as Hawaiian and Vietnamese.

Arlyn Ramos: Living as a designer in Hawai’i, I work with Hawaiian words often. Many place names are in Hawaiian, Hawaiian values and concepts are often integrated into daily life and local culture, and don’t forget the names of food! When we provide greater language support, it means greater inclusivity for various peoples and cultures. Needless to say, having the glyphs available means a night and day difference for semantics. And being limited to certain fonts is stifling. I really notice this limitation on the web. Having more fonts with support means more possibilities and options for visual expression.

M. S.: From your application, it’s clear you love food. Tell us why it is so important to you and how it has influenced your type design. Take us through examples of your typefaces that exemplify this.

Arlyn Ramos: Food is my main way of connecting to culture and to other people. I love learning about food, cooking, sharing meals, and going on foodie adventures.

Food can carry so much power and feeling. There are recipes, flavors, and dishes I associate with core memories. This is probably why food is a recurring theme in my work.

For my typeface, Noodeau, the inspiration is clear—noodles. I think about and eat noodles quite a lot. Noodles have been with me through the ups and downs of life—especially the downturns. So I was compelled to design a font that captures a distinctly noodly spirit. After a few rounds of type cooker sketches, I started pulling Art Nouveau inspiration in and ended up drawing some promising squiggles and folds. Eventually, the font adopted a little bit of a slant to facilitate forward movement, and I also decided it needed to be a connected script for maximum noodle power. This typeface project presented many challenges in achieving legibility, evenness of color, and balance. But with help from my mentors (shout out to Type Electives), a lot of massaging, and a little bit of rule-breaking, in the end the system somehow works.

Adriana Garcidueñas is a graphic designer and type designer. Studied in the TypeWest program in 2023 with a full BIPOC scholarship and also she studied at Type@Cooper Condensed this past summer. Currently she works for the arabic type foundry ArabicTypography.com directed by Tarek Atrissi doing both arabic and latin typography; she also very recently started freelancing for DOT Type Foundry (Death Of Typography) located in Singapore. She can be found being Teacher Assistant or attending to type, lettering or calligraphy workshops and when she finally has some free time she watches BTS videos ♥. (Yes, the Korean boyband).

Malee Scholarship: When did you first get interested in letterforms?

Adriana Garcidueñas: I think I became obsessed with letters from a very young age. You see, I’m dyslexic, so words and letters didn’t make much sense to me. After countless hours of practice trying to differentiate “b” from “d,” I found a method to distinguish them by making the “b” a sans serif shape and the “d” with a cursive ductus. Perhaps from that moment, a sensitivity to letter shapes sparked in my mind. Time passed, and I started to collect nice letters by printing “The quick brown fox,” because I didn’t know how to install fonts on a computer. The best next thing I could do was print them and trace them by hand to create the most fabulous and flashy homework for school (I still have those printed foxes at my parents’ house).

I think the day I taught myself how to install a font on a computer was one of the happiest days of my entire life—seriously.

M. S.: What has been a formative experience for you in your journey to type design, and what would you recommend to aspiring type design students?

Adriana Garcidueñas: The most important thing I have found in my journey in type design is a community.

When I started in the world of lettering it was a very lonely journey for me because I lived in a small town, I didn’t know anyone who was doing the same thing as me, so I’m pretty self-taught. At that time there was not much information on the Internet about lettering or calligraphy, much less about typographic design. So I went to Mexico City and bought a calligraphy book, and I started with exercises and practices, but only with the company of this book (which was actually a compendium of calligraphy styles). Most of the time I was frustrated and desperate to get the damn ink to flow through the very flexible pointed nib, spoiler: wrong ink with wrong nib. But at that time that was all I had, so I kept practicing until one fatal day when I broke the only pen holder I had in half, and that’s not the bad news, I mean yes, but what I was practicing English Roundhand, a very soft hand and fluid style of calligraphy, that was what made me stop and realize that I was doing everything wrong and that I had to get help.

When we were confined to our homes, I first heard about the Letrástica Community—a group of people who share a love for making letters. During the pandemic, there was “Jueves de letritas” (Thursday of letters), a Zoom meeting where people got together to do TypeCookers. I was shy at first, but participating was one of the best decisions I made. In this group, I leveled up my skills with letters, learned about educational programs and scholarships, and discovered that I wasn’t alone. Now I’m happy to call many of them my friends. It’s to these friends that I run for help when I mess up a glyphs file, or need advice on pricing a font, or just want to talk about life.

I recommend type design students join a community or start their own with other type nerds (classmates or friends interested in letters). It’s enriching and super nerdy, but it’s really fun, I promise. ;)

M. S.: What has/have been the most interesting typeface design project(s) you have drawn so far? Tell us more about your inspiration and experience.

Adriana Garcidueñas: My first most interesting project actually I sketched in the first TypeCooker session with the Letrástica Community. It’s called Tlayuda because that was the word we used during that session, and it’s a font that explores the limits of variability in an unconventional way by playing with the plasticity of the letter.

Another project that I’m really fond of is called Hell Inc. It is my final project from the TypeWest program, which is a type family that takes inspiration from the Divine Comedy and the psychedelic movement. With this type, I explored how to externalize my feelings of angst, delusion, and disappointment through type design. I also guess the countless hours sitting at the desk thinking about this helped as some sort of therapy. The heavy weight represents Hell in Dante’s Inferno, the regular weight represents Limbo, and the italic weight represents Heaven—it's an allegory of redemption through weight and proportion.

And the final and most recent is my final project from Type@Cooper called Novellus, a typeface for new and eternal classics. It's a text typeface where legibility and good rhythm for long texts are the main goals. This typeface is really close to me because in the process of making it, I learned so much, but I also can't believe I made it! I mean, it's so out of my style, but I like it a lot!