The May 2025 launch of Anderson University Type Foundry (AUTF) represents the culmination of years of work and anticipation by students and faculty of the Art and Design Department of the South Carolina School of the Arts.
True to Anderson University’s pillar of Great Academics, students involved in AUTF deeply immerse themselves in the art of typography, drawing inspiration from near and far. Their experiences range from observing an old hand-painted sign on an abandoned store nearby to travels to Italy and researching thousands of years of typographic art.
“I think typography is something that is often overlooked,” said AUTF President Elise Frauenholtz. “People don’t often think about where the fonts that they use on the computer come from, but behind every letter you type, there is a designer who sat in front of their sketchbook or computer for hours trying to get the curve of the ‘R’ just right or making sure the spacing between characters is correct.”
Associate Professor of Art Tim Speaker knows of no other student-led type foundries.
“It’s pretty groundbreaking in terms of what the students are doing,” Speaker said. “I’m proud of their efforts and their passion for it… And I think it’s admirable and exciting that they’re so engaged with this, that they want to take their time and their efforts to create something that is really cutting edge, really innovative and ahead of the curve in so many ways.”
Taking a typography class during her sophomore year, Emeli Bagwell became fascinated about the process of designing typefaces. Now a senior, Bagwell is AUTF’s campaign director.
“We’re trying to do a new campaign every year focusing on the new typeface launches that we’ve planned,” Bagwell said. “That’s just thinking about what kind of material do we want to design? What do we want the look and feel to be for this year? What do we want our posters to look like? What kind of merch do we want to make?”
This past summer, Speaker, along with Art and Design Department Chair Michael Marks, traveled with 19 Anderson University students to Italy, a cradle of typography history. They spent most of their time in Florence, but also went to Rome, Sienna, and the Tuscan town of San Gimignano.
“We’re definitely a strong partnership. Michael handles logistics and leads lectures on architecture, painting and drawing. I cover typography and design,” Speaker said, adding that the trip is coordinated through CAPA, a major provider of study abroad experiences.
The trip, like several others AU students have done over the years, is more than just sightseeing—it’s intensive research into typography developed over thousands of years.
“Sometimes I’ll point out on a corner typography that’s 400-500 years old from the Renaissance. There will be fascist signage from the 1920s through the 1940s. Then, there’s contemporary signage from the last 10 years or so—all on the same street corner. And then you’ll have graffiti on top of that, which may have been put there yesterday,” Speaker said.
“One of the coolest things to see is this juxtaposition when you’re just walking around Italy,” Bagwell recalled. “You’ll see carved on the side of the building this Romanesque type and then under it it’ll just be modern street art, and it kind of works together in this really beautiful way… It personifies what that city is about and what that culture is.”
“It’s like excavating typography—almost like archaeology,” Speaker said. “One of the things that I think blows student’s minds is the depth of the historic timeline, because, ‘old’ to us in America is something that’s maybe 30, 40, 50 or 100 years old.”
Seeing students, some traveling out of the U.S. for the first time, excited and wide-eyed as they experience another culture and much larger cities, never gets old for Speaker. And although someone in the group this year was fluent in Italian, he contends that type styles transcend language differences.
“When we arrive, we spend some time in lecture with the students and specifically pointing out not just what they’re going to see, but what to look for and also how to classify certain classifications of typography,” Speaker said. “I talk about a couple of major historic movements that we see in dealing with type. I try to prepare them to decode it and understand ‘this must have come from this period’ or ‘this must have come from this period.’ Even if they don’t speak the language, they can look at the style of the typography and decode it.”
A highlight of the trip came when they visited Zetafonts, a type foundry in Florence that specializes in creating revival typefaces (pictured above).
“They walked us through their process of that and showed us where they got their sources from, like from these old cathedrals and historic places in Italy and creating from that workable type faces that people can use and download. It’s a way of preserving the beauty and the culture and history of Florence,” Frauenholtz said. “I think that was honestly one of my favorite parts of the trip, which is a little crazy to say because you’re in Florence and you’re seeing all these Renaissance paintings and just being inundated with all this artwork, but I consider typography just to be just as much art as any of the rest of the things that people go to Florence to see.”
The Italy experience, Speaker believes, has become inseparable from the work students do in AUTF.
“It has become a kind of supercharged learning experience for students,” Speaker said. “They attend this course on the ground in Italy and do the research there, then they come back and they are able to take the Digital Resurrections of Typography course… They’ll develop that typography into a digital form, which will hopefully find its way then into the foundry.”
Visit the AUTF website autypefoundry.com to browse fonts, which are also available for free download.