micah rich
The League’s Typelog
3 min readNov 16, 2016

--

There are two types of amazing people in our community: people who want to learn more about using fonts, and people who want to learn more about making them.

By far, our biggest & loftiest goal is that we want to be the place where people come to learn how to use & make typography.

Now, there are a lot of resources out there about both. Designers have multitudes of blog posts, half-tutorials, specific techniques, and tricks posted here & there, sprinkled around the internet & in countless books. There are universities, too, of course, with hefty price tags & a whole lot that comes with it besides just learning. University just isn’t a good fit for everyone, and even those that have gone sometimes still have a lot to learn afterwords.

But we have an opportunity to combine the best of both worlds — the detailed, practical information that comes from scattered tutorials, and the human community, personal feedback, and mentorship that comes from real life teachers.

And there’s something magical that comes when learning from scrappy, self-taught teachers, who care so passionately about what they’re teaching and how they teach it.

Starting at the Start

We’re starting with beginner-friendly courses, and only tackling intermediate & advanced stuff in the future, for one specific reason: we want to be able to help you at every scary step. By starting with beginning courses, we can focus on important fundamentals and make sure everyone gets the feedback & solid footing they need to keep going before they do.

And we’re starting with online video/text courses, because it’s something that works. While we’d absolutely love to do in-person workshops (and hopefully at some point we can), the internet is too big a place, and there’s too much to help with. Instead of piecing together scattered local workshops, we want to be there for the people in-between the cracks.

And we want to get things in your hands ASAP, and hear your feedback, and learn what you want & need. Structuring it with multimedia is a great way to do exactly that. We’ve been working on our structure, topics, and process behind-the-scenes all summer, and we’re close to actually launching to our first batch of students.

Doing Is The Key

Now, we have a lot of experience designing & building courses, including work designing & teaching courses for General Assembly, and one of the most important things we’ve learned is how vital it is to do things and create things, not just watch & read.

We’ll be building classes as interactive & hands-on as we possibly can, and focusing heavily on how we can provide real, individual mentorship with such a tiny, tiny team in the beginning. But this, too, is where our community-building comes in—the ability to collaborate & get feedback from fellow students & community members is going to be so, so important.

Our Mission

We’re here, and have always been here, to help new designers learn everything they need to to level up their typography skills.

And this is a chance to leave a legacy; to build a new generation of open, sharing, collaborative & amazing designers together. A place to learn & grow, to build & collaborate.

For now, we’re working on our first set of courses, and we’ll keep our email list in the loop first as we make progress & get closer to launch. We can’t wait to show you what we can do.

--

--

micah rich
The League’s Typelog

Founder of The League of Moveable Type, the first open-source font foundry.