The New Talent Program

Can anyone cook?

Back in January, Blaze Type kicked off a new mentoring programme for junior type designers. Six months in, and this whole experience keeps bringing back that line from Ratatouille: "Can anyone cook?" Fresh out of art school, we'd probably have said "hell no" to that. This programme proved us wrong.

The selection

We put a call out on Instagram — anyone with an ongoing project who wanted to get it published, come find us. We ended up with 59 entries, from Peru, the USA, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Vietnam, Taiwan, and more. We picked typefaces that were genuinely hand-drawn (not modular), with real design qualities and a clear typographic vision. Some of these projects had that "why didn't I think of that" energy — the good kind. Something we would be proud to feature in our catalog. A few participants had studied under some big names in type education, but most are self-taught, learning on Glyphs or FontLab, just with a real hunger to actually finish a project for once. The programme now has 20 people in it.

How it works

It always starts with an introduction, just to explain how things work and set expectations — this takes time, it's not a weekend project. Who does what? Participants handle the glyphset, spacing and kerning themselves; we're there to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly. There are regular check-ins along the way for feedback, file reviews, quality control, plus some tips and shortcuts to help work faster. Honestly the trickiest part is getting people out of "exploration mode" and into "finisher mode" — that shift in mindset is huge. You've gotta be efficient and keep it simple.

What's the job?

The project builds up gradually — usually starting with the lightest master, letters first, then figures, diacritics, punctuation, symbols — then doing the whole thing again for bold, italic, bold italic, then all the kerning on top. There's engineering support along the way too, for all the technical stuff. And then comes the fun part: getting the marketing sorted before it all goes live. How fun isn’t it?

Learnings

One thing that became obvious pretty fast: the best part of this whole programme is how much we're learning right alongside them. If we had to sum up everything these participants taught us, just by learning it themselves, it'd be something like:

● Respect the foundry's minimum glyph set Keep ligatures and alternates to a minimum — don't dilute the typographic direction into non choices
● Make the italic as simple and quick to produce as possible. Let's be real, sales are mostly on the roman anyway
● Build the biggest possible design space so users actually get real choice
● Always check your work against benchmark typefaces, especially for the shapes you're less familiar with, like accents
● Prioritise the colour and the overall reading feel of the text — more eyes, less ruler
● Stay honest with the end user: a regular weight has to actually look like a regular
● Strong choices, done fast, clean and tidy.

Can anyone be a type designer?

At last, it's the same dynamic as design school studio culture — pinning proofs on the wall, roasting each other properly, swapping tips, asking someone to draw the one glyph you're stuck on, pushing each other to do better. You save so much time just by getting an outside eye on your work instead of going in circles alone. That's really the whole point of this programme — taking that dynamic and stretching it beyond the walls of school. So, can anyone be a type designer? Yeah, actually — as long as there's a studio around you. Even a virtual one.