8w
Weeks
A small live workshop I run twice a year from my studio in Lisbon. Eight weeks, twelve students, two evenings a week. We each end with a printed type specimen, mailed out in October.
"Most courses teach you software. This one teaches you to see. By week four you cannot un-see what you've learned, which is exactly the point."
— from the cohort 01 wrap-up
€1,680 · or three payments of €580 · two reduced-rate seats per cohort — just ask.
Strokes, terminals, joins. How a letter is constructed and how that construction reveals itself in the page. We end the week drawing five letters by hand.
Humanist, transitional, modern, slab, grotesque. We read four short essays and look at twenty specimens. Pattern-recognition, not memorisation.
The space between letters is what you actually see. We do six exercises in measuring optical spacing and four in kerning pairs by hand.
Measure, leading, rag, widow, orphan, hyphenation. How to set five hundred words so the reader does not notice they have read them. This is the week the unseeing breaks.
Headlines, decks, pull quotes. Size, weight, colour, position. We design three magazine spreads using exactly one typeface and disprove the rule that you can't.
Why most pairings fail. How to build a small kit of two or three families you can actually use. Pairing as a question about voice, not contrast.
The web is not print, and pretending otherwise has cost us a decade. Variable fonts, CSS subsetting, responsive scale, performance, and the curious failure of most type stacks.
You build a printed specimen for a typeface you have grown to love over the previous seven weeks. A small object. A real thing. Sent to your home in October.
You learned the basics in school and on the job, but it has been a while since you read about a typeface or kerned a wordmark by hand. You miss it. You want a real reason to come back.
You build interfaces, you care about type, and you have a small but growing suspicion that none of the engineers around you actually do. You want the vocabulary and the rigour to argue your case.
You're three years into senior work and the kit you've been using is starting to feel small. You want eight weeks with a teacher and eleven peers to enlarge it on purpose.
I'm a type designer in Lisbon. I worked in editorial and identity design for about a decade — including a long stretch at a small London studio I'm fond of — before going independent in 2018. Since then I've mostly drawn type and set books.
In 2022 I released Penedo, a humanist serif that picked up a Type Directors Club Certificate of Excellence. I started teaching this workshop in 2025 because I missed the conversation. Cohort 01 wrapped in May; cohort 02 starts in September.
14 September – 9 November 2026
Same workshop, full participation
Week four broke me in the best way. I have set body text every day of my professional life and I had never once looked at the rag with any kind of attention. I cannot stop looking at it now.
I am a developer. I came in with strong opinions and left with calibrated ones, which is an entirely different and better thing. Inez is unusually generous with engineers who want to learn properly.
The specimen project is the best thing I have made in five years. I keep it on my desk. I show clients. I think about it before opening a new file. Worth the tuition for that alone.
One short form. A paragraph about why this course, why now. A link or two to recent work, if you have them. No portfolio required.