Typography Masterclass

Elliot Jay Stocks

Your instructor: Elliot Jay Stocks

Workshop includes:

🔖 Examples to take away
🗣 Interactive sessions
📺 Workshop recordings
🎤 Dedicated Q&A time
🏅 Smashing Certificate

Workshop, 5×2h + Q&A • Mon & Tue, June 10–24 2024
09:00 – 11:30 AM PT • 18:00 – 20:30 CET • Check your time zone ⏰

We communicate with text every single day, but what does it mean to really understand type — to use it with clear intent and purpose? The art and science of typography combines subtle tweaks to line lengths with harmonious combinations of weights and styles; considered typeface pairings with a robust set of alternate characters; exciting technological advances with the realities of font licensing.

In three weeks, over five focussed sessions, you’ll gain a deep understanding of the universal principles of typography and learn how to apply them across any work you do with type, from the simplest of documents to the most complex of cross-platform design systems.

Here’s What You Should Be Expecting:

Interactive live sessions

5 × 2.5h live sessions

Practical insights

From simple documents to cross-platform design systems

Hands-on exercises

With reviews by your teacher

Life-time access

To all video recordings and examples

Dedicated Q&A time

To ask all your questions

Smashing Certificate

A well-deserved reward for your work

There are so many ways we as designers can optimise how our text is read and influence the way its message is understood — and yet so many of us miscommunicate without even realising.

Building upon tried-and-tested principles from the world of print through to the very latest advances in browser technology, this workshop will equip you with everything you need to make the most informed typographic decisions in your design work today.

We’ll Cover:

Working with typography as part of a design system
How to evaluate typefaces for pairings that actually work
Getting the best out of variable fonts
Responsive type & fluid type scales
Weights, styles, widths, and optical sizes — what they are, why you’d use them, and how to implement them properly (on the web and in print)
Using grade when designing for dark mode
The ultimate checklist for choosing and pairing type
How good typography is optical trickery: hanging punctuation, widows and orphans, indenting, incremental leading, and much more
Type anatomy and classification
Line-height, line length (measure), letter-spacing (tracking), and kerning
Alternate glyphs & implementing OpenType features
Licensing type, and installing and managing fonts
Font delivery services vs. self-hosting
Loading and optimising web fonts
Size perception & inaccuracies when typesetting
Working with typographic controls in Figma, Adobe apps, and in CSS

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for interface designers, front-end designers and developers, and anyone else who wants to deepen their understanding about type and typography.

About Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot is a designer with 20 years’ experience working on the web and in print, known in typographic circles as the founder of 8 Faces magazine, the Creative Director of Adobe Fonts, the co-creator of Google Fonts Knowledge, and most recently, the author of Universal Principles of Typography (Quarto, 2024).

Elliot and his work have been profiled in publications such as Communication Arts, Creative Review, and Page, and he is a familiar face at design and tech conferences all over the globe, including TYPO, Web Directions, SXSW, and SmashingConf.

Time & Schedule

This workshop is split over five days. The workshop sessions will run on the following days:

Mon, June 10, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
Tue, June 11, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
Mon, June 17, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
Tue, June 18, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)
Mon, June 24, 09:00 – 12:00 AM PT (18:00 – 21:00 CET)

You can always re-watch the sessions at a more convenient time and follow the workshop at your own pace.