Ben Mitchell
Ben Mitchell is a freelance type designer based in Brighton, UK.
He studied his masters in typeface design at the University of Reading, graduating with distinction in 2012. His research and dissertation traced the evolution of the Burmese alphabet from its Brahmi roots in inscriptions, palm-leaf manuscripts and traditional folding books, through its initial casting in metal type in 1776, to its modern-day form. This research culminated in the completion of a font family supporting Burmese, Thai and Latin.
He is continuing to develop his specialisation in the scripts of Southeast Asia, a region Ben has been visiting for almost 20 years. He spends most of his time these days designing fonts for Thai, Lao, Burmese and Khmer, and regularly makes research trips to Southeast Asia to study typography, lettering and handwriting, which help inform his professional practice.
Ben aims to base his design work on firm foundations, by discussing languages, palaeography and current typographic conventions with academics, designers, software engineers and publishers who work with Southeast Asian writing systems. He also studies Southeast Asia's manuscript tradition, by consulting archives at the British Library, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Siam Society among others.
Ben has worked on text, display and user interface (UI) fonts, script extensions, retail and custom designs, and has consulted on existing non-Latin typefaces. Clients include Adobe, Brody Associates, Monotype, Miles Newlyn, Rosetta Type Foundry and Tiro Typeworks.
Alongside the development of new type families, Ben teaches type design workshops in the UK and in Thailand (including on the CommDe course at Chulalongkorn University), and enjoys talking about type at conferences.
BITS 6 International Workshop
Ben Mitchell
October 8, 2016.
1.00 pm. - 3.00 pm.
Workshop room, TCDC
Available slots : 10 person
“Exploring multi-script logo design”
Localisation of products and their logos is an ever-increasing part of company branding, especially in Southeast Asia. But some companies are doing better jobs than others at translating their aesthetic into different scripts. This workshop will give participants the chance to design a logo/wordmark in a variety of Southeast Asian scripts, preserving the essential characteristics of the parent brand.
BITS 6 International Conference
Ben Mitchell
October 9, 2016.
Session 2 (1.00 pm. - 3.00 pm.)
W Hotel
“How can we learn to design fonts like a native?”
Most type designers are much more familiar with their own, native writing system, than with any other. But this shouldn’t mean that we can’t develop the skills to design other scripts like a native. With a special emphasis on the Southeast Asian scripts, Ben will identify the most useful resources we can seek when designing for an unfamiliar writing system, explore what it means to become familiar with a writing system, and note what to look at when trying to balance different scripts into one unified design.