Occupant Fonts is happy to announce its typefaces are now available via Morisawa Fonts, a new global font subscription service. Starting on October 15, 2024, approximately half our library will join over 2,000 other high-quality designs, covering an extensive variety of Asian languages and Latin. The rest of the Occupant Fonts library will be added in spring 2025.

Morisawa Fonts new releases

The Occupants are looking forward to attending the annual conference of Association Typographique Internationale in Paris this May. Cyrus, Victoria, and Marie will all be there. Cyrus is giving a talk on May 12 about his drawing and teaching practice called Black Strokes and White Shapes.

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As part of Charlottesville Design Week, Marie discusses how variable fonts are used in “real time” and participates in a panel on type design for the conference forum. The following day, she is hosting a workshop on using variable fonts on the web.

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Cyrus Highsmith travels to Barcelona to give a workshop at Elisava. He and the students will spend the week making letters and other things using unconventional tools and printing methods. And eating tapas.

Marie hosts a public workshop and lecture, “Inter-active Letterforms”, at Rice University as part of their Scientia visiting artist program. Using paper cutouts and a RISO Machine, participants experimented with the form and counterform of typefaces.

Marie presents experimental explorations in variable font usage as part of Type@Cooper’s Herb Lubalin Lecture Series.

Recorded Talk

Marie joins Daniel Rhatigan, Matteo Bologna, Charles Nix, and Joe Newton to teach Building Brands With Type, a summer program between July 5 - 29, 2022 at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

SVA Artist Residency Programs

Cyrus is looking forward to his workshop, Thinking With Your Hands, this June at Elisava in Barcelona. Get away from your computer, get your hands dirty, and do some drawing/painting/printing/stenciling this summer.

TypeJuly @ Elisava

Marie shared her work on variable font interfaces with students at the TypeMedia program in Den Haag.

Marie shared a talk on type for a class on Design Thinking at the School of Visual Arts in New York, along with Tereza Bettinardi.

Occupant Fonts is very happy to announce Victoria Rushton has become an occupant! Cyrus says, “Victoria brings her own sense of style to Occupant, we are lucky to have her on the team”. He and Victoria go back all the way to Font Bureau and RISD. They are both excited to be working together again.

Cyrus and Angela Riechers discuss the eclectic components that came together to form Occupant Oldstyle.

AIGA Eye on Design

Cem and Lisa Maione dissect the process behind Mantar and discuss approaches of drawing type at Occupant Fonts.

AIGA Eye on Design

Marie and Nic share a demo of the Variable Font Substituion Mapper, an open source tool from Occupant Fonts for managing glyph substitutions across your font’s design space.

Access the toolDocumentationRecorded talk

Cyrus and Cem share a conversation about the development of Mantar, Occupant Fonts’ spring 2021 release.

Cem is invited to be one of the speakers for the Boston University Graphic Design Spring 2021 Speaker Series.

Cyrus talks about sketchbooks, typefaces, printmaking, postcards, and other things he does to keep himself occupied. If you missed it, there is a recording at the link to the right.

Cem will be visiting Parsons’ Senior Thesis class, taught by Andrew Leclair, as a guest lecturer and critic.

Dos Uno Studio, a design & social media management studio based in Mexico, will interview June about her creative practices and recent projects.

In this public lecture hosted by Letterform Archive, Cyrus will talk about his new job, approach to art and design, and what it means to be an Occupant.

June will talk about her experience as a recipient of the 2018 Society of Scribes Scholarship and share what she learned about calligraphy from the perspective of a type designer.

Watch

In this public Type West workshop, Cyrus will teach a messy, hands-on, computer-free way of making and thinking about letters. This is a two-day virtual workshop (December 5–6).

Cyrus will talk about his book Inside Paragraphs and and demonstrate, with engaging images and accessible explanations, the role of white space between letters, words, and lines.

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In a panel moderated by Ellen Lupton, Marie joins Curry Hackett and Kristian Bjørnard to discuss the environmental, social, and economic impacts of designed objects as a final part of this year’s MICA Design Talks series.

Livestream

June joins Christian Schwartz, Dave Crossland, and Frida Medrano in TypeCraft 2020, a roundtable discussion about new and upcoming developments in the type world. The event is hosted by the Society of Publication Designers.

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Occupant Fonts is giving a talk on how R&D drives our studio practice at TMX this year! Cyrus, June, Marie, Cem, and Nic will each share our thinking behind recent projects surrounding our type design process.

Recorded talk

Based on their work on Low-tech Magazine, Marie and collaborator Roel Roscam Abbing will host a workshop on sustainable web design at the 2020 Ethics By Design Conference.

Hang out in a Zoom meeting with Cyrus and June for Typographics on Friday, July 24 and Saturday, July 25 as part of the Typographics conference! They’ll chat about how June got into type design as a student of Cyrus, in a super casual interview. Take a peek inside Cyrus’ awesome garage studio and Occupant Fonts’ latest type specimen board book. Bring questions!

RegisterTypographics

We’re kerned out! Nic, Cem, and Marie will take part in Typographics 2020’s online TypeLab at 7:30pm EST, on June 19th. They will present their work designing kerning tools with machine learning.

TypeLabtype.tools

At a Standing-Room Only Lecture at Katherine Small Gallery, Cyrus, June, Cem, and Marie talks about life at Occupant Fonts and what it means to be an Occupant. Tickets required.

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Cem and June contribute their soon-to-be-released typefaces to the latest issue of O1 Magazine featuring the work of foreign-born type designers working in the U.S. The magazine launches at Hunter East Harlem Gallery as a free public program of the exhibition The Extraordinary. Purchase a copy on the magazine’s website.

O1 MagazineEvent details

Marie and Lauren Traugott-Campbell discuss strategies for responsible design in the face of climate change.

AIGA Eye on Design Issue 6, Utopias

June will be visiting Parsons’ Core 1 Typography (section B) class, taught by Daniel Frumhoff, as a guest lecturer/critic.

Cem will be visiting History and Politics of Typography as a guest lecturer. He will be talking about Politics of Style and limitations of drawing Cyrillic and Greek.

Marie will be joining a panel with David Jonathan Ross, Elizabeth Carey Smith, and Paul Barnes on a discussion as part of the yearly Updike Type Design Award Ceremony, hosted by the Providence Public Library.

Updike Prize for Student Type Design

Cyrus will join Gerry Leonidas and Veronika Burian for a type crit at the ATypI conference in Tokyo, Japan.

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June’s pun-ridden illustrations drawn inside some of our typefaces are one of the highlights of TYPE Magazine No.4.

Type Magazine

Cem was part of a panel discussion on how Instagram is changing the way design educators teach and students learn.

AIGA Eye on Design Issue

Cem will share some insights ranging from the importance of play all the way to the dark corners of kerning. Or how these two things could even be used in the same sentence!

Event detailsRecorded talk

Cyrus Highsmith and Tetsuo Sakomura present about Occupant Fonts at Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo, Japan.

Marie will speak about collaboration and type design as part of a book launch for Latent Space: Notes on Seeing Letters Like a Machine, along with authors Federico Pérez Villoro and Nic Schumann.

Book details

June will be giving a lecture on the history and practice of Hangul in contemporary design and leading a Hangul lettering workshop.

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June will participate in the first-ever AIGA NY and Type Directors Club’s collaborative event series. She will present her work and join the panel discussion around the relationship between type designers and graphic designers.

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June will be delivering a keynote lecture on the work she does at Occupant Fonts at AIGA RI’s event, Know Her Summit.

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Cyrus will be giving a presentation to visual art educator, Aarav Sundaresh’s students at Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island.

June will be speaking about her work in and outside of Occupant Fonts at the Dynamic Font Day conference in Munich

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June will give a lecture to the graphic design students at Boston University and visit a typography class as a guest critic.

Marie will be presenting her project with Low-tech Magazine, a solar-powered website. Radical Networks is a conference that celebrates the free and open Internet. Along with collaborator Roel Roscam Abbing, she will share the design decisions that reveal the infrastructure of the website and promote a more sustainable use of the internet.

Event detailsProject website

June was awarded the Certificate of Typographic Excellence from Type Directors Club. Besides being exhibited in New York City, the winners will also be included in 8 identical exhibitions that will tour dozens of cities in the United States, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

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Cyrus Highsmith received the Gerrit Noordzij Prize in 2015. As per tradition, 3 years later Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten hosted an exhibition of his work. It was curated and installed by the TypeMedia class of '18 assisted by Highsmith.

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Cem is giving a talk about processes of designing complex systems and how it ties to his practice of Type Design at Occupant Fonts. The talk will conclude a brief introduction to Variable Type technology.

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June will be sharing her work and experiences as a foreigner making creative work in the U.S. at TOAST, an international design conference hosted by Maryland Institute College of Art.

June and Cem are holding a Q&A on type design after a screening of Hanzi, a documentary exploring international design, visual culture and identity through the lens of modern Chinese typography.

About the documentary