What is The Future Of Type? Together with Brandpad, we ask top type designers for their hot takes

Welcome to The Future Of, a series presented in collaboration with digital brand guidelines platform Brandpad. Over the course of six articles, we’ll speak to the brightest designers, studios and agencies about the future of graphic design, unspooling the ideas that will shape tomorrow. For our debut story, we look at The Future Of Type. We’re curious – how will typefaces be created in the future? What kind of a role will emerging technologies play in how we make, use and experience type? Will the future be just as inclusive as experimental? We took our burning questions to some leading designers, foundries and thought leaders in the world of type. In a scene in the 2007 documentary Helvetica, design critic Rick Poynor says, “Type is saying things to us all the time.” More than a decade since, his words still ring with a universal truth. To anyone looking closely, type tells us many things – about the ideas that hold our attention at a moment in time, the tools at our disposal, and the way we decide to use them. From the time it was etched on stones and palm leaves, to now, when it dances on our screens, the mediums through which type has been constructed have changed drastically, and today, the industry stands at the precipice of new emerging technologies. In spite of all the turning wheels, the craft of type design has remained as meticulous as ever. “It’s a truly painstaking, time-consuming, attention-to-detail, for-the-love-of-it art form,” Otherwhere Collective’s Creative Director Andrew Bellamy tells us. Designer, typographer and educator Beatriz Lozano agrees. “At its core, I believe the process of creating a typeface hasn’t changed much in the past decades. You have to start with a solid concept, iterate endlessly, build your system, and refine your characters for all eternity or until you start to feel the early onset symptoms of carpal tunnel,” she says.