In this course designers take found historic lettering and put it to contemporary use in a digital context. To act as a conduit passing history into the future by crafting fonts for use by subsequent designers, students honor those craftspeople of the past.

The Digital Resurrections In Typographic course was the result of an experiment. It began with a simple premise: by diving deep into the past for vernacular typography, ghost type, lost signage, and “dead” type specimens, could antiqued forms be renewed in a contemporary, digital context? And what kind of result would they yield?

This experiment was undertaken through a desire to connect to the unknown, nameless, and deserted sign-painters, letterers, typographers, and designers lost to history. We sought to recover, to revive, and to resurrect them. To rescue their overlooked, wayward beauties of typographic form, forgotten for decades, left to dissipate and decay. To breathe life into them through digital methods. The results are at turns surprising and subtle, elegant and radical, playful and sublime. In short, they are alive.

Long may they – and those they seek to digitally resurrect – live on.

—Tim Speaker, Director of the AU Type Foundry