Making Letters: Typography Across Hand, Screen, and Loom

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How do the tools used to create letterforms shape the way those forms are imagined, constructed, and understood? In this presentation, graphic designer, educator, type designer, and fiber artist Amy Copeland traces her evolving relationship with typography across analog, digital, and textile practices. Beginning with hand-lettered high school book covers and the construction of letterforms with gouache and a ruling pen in college, she follows this trajectory through professional art direction and digital typesetting, original typeface design, and her recent project of weaving the alphabet.

Through this practice-based account, Copeland considers how typographic knowledge moves between technologies and materials. Digital tools make letterforms reproducible, scalable, and precisely adjustable; weaving translates those same forms into physical structures governed by warp, weft, tension, sequence, and touch. These material constraints do more than alter the appearance of a letter—they influence how it is conceived and constructed.Rather than treating analog and digital processes as opposites, Copeland explores the productive exchange between them. Her work demonstrates how knowledge gained through one form of making can migrate into another, revealing letters not as fixed symbols but as adaptable structures shaped by tools, materials, and embodied experience.

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Amy Copeland loves to make things. A graphic designer and educator for more than 30 years, she brings her interest in typography and letterforms to her weaving practice. She recently completed a woven alphabet and also creates tapestries and rugs using geometric shapes and patterns. Her work has been exhibited at Worthington Yards in Cleveland, Lakeland Community College, Cyrus Gallery, Malone College Art Gallery, and the McDonough Museum of Art at Youngstown State University.

Copeland is an Assistant Professor of Graphic + Interactive Design at Youngstown State University. She holds a BS in Graphic Design from the University of Cincinnati, an MFA in Visual Communication Design, and an MS in User Experience Design from Kent State University. She recently earned a postgraduate certificate in type design through the Type West program at Letterform Archive.