Grace Spee, Amira Hegazy, and Sharon Oiga at TypeCon 2024

Clinical Assistant Professor Grace Spee and Adjunct Assistant Professor Amira Hegazy presented their typographic research at this year’s TypeCon in Portland, Oregon.

Grace showcased her digital media design class’s work advancing creative typography in augmented reality. Grace and her students explored the connection between pixel type, digital media, and game mechanics collaboratively through letterform creation and animation in AR. Students created pixel letterforms, and explored how rules of type anatomy might translate, or not translate, to 8-bit parameters. Students were then introduced to an augmented reality application, fluidly switching between 2D and 3D with a workflow that stretched from sketches to laptops to mobile phones. Play and games were a major force in the design process, and the class discussed virtual versus analog play. Students filmed their AR type in locations around Chicago and presented it in a class exhibition. More information on this project can be found at the YES! 2024 exhibition website. 

Amira presented her work examining the typographic character of Chicago’s unique neighborhoods. For the last three years Amira has explored Chicago’s unique neighborhoods, looking at and learning from the distinctive typographic character of the communities. She joined a graffiti crew, worked on lettering exercises with ex-gang members and studied sign painting to understand how community based typographic traditions differ from other methods in practice, form, and concept. This research reveals how letterforms in Chicago’s neighborhoods amplify systems of care, safety, and love by promoting highly localized aesthetics. Making clear the differences between authentic and gentrified, the lived experience of community members, designers and artists build the case for counternarratives in community-based design traditions. Drawing on these design legacies, Amira presented how love, based in its radical, liberatory definitions, is a force for designing communities of growth, safety, and celebration.

Sharon Oiga, Professor of Graphic Design, led the TypeCon Education Forum. Also pictured are School of Design alums Guy Villa Jr (co-host of Ed Forum) and Alice Lee (MDes graduate).

UIC Design was also present in TypeCon’s gallery, with exhibited work by Sharon and Guy, Senior Print Lab Specialist Daniel Mellis, and MDes alums Joe Brinkworth and Austin Watson.