Ben Mitchell
Founder and director of The Fontpad, Ben Mitchell is a type designer and researcher specialised in the scripts of Southeast Asia, a region he has been visiting for more than 25 years. With a long-held interest in visual communication and especially different writing systems, and having lived in Thailand from 2002 to 2006, he has become one of the foremost researchers of Southeast Asian scripts.
He has designed and consulted on fonts for Burmese, Buginese, Chak, Cham, Khmer, Kwekaw (Myainggyingu), Lao, New Tai Lue, Tai Phake, Thai, Tham and Vietnamese, and regularly makes research trips to Southeast Asia to study typography, lettering and handwriting to inform his professional practice.
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.
Ben takes an interdisciplinary view of type design, seeking to build connections with people working in areas such as language and cultural studies, palaeography, graphic design, lexicography, publishing and software engineering. By collecting, examining and synthesising as broad a range of resources as possible, Ben’s approach is reflective, critical and meticulous. He is particularly interested in the questions of how we unify different scripts into a coherent design while preserving the unique characteristics of each, and how we tackle the creation of typefaces for scripts that have never before been represented typographically.
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, Apple, Black Foundry, Bold Monday, Brody Associates, bbox, Colophon Foundry, Google, Grab, Hoefler & Co, Indian Type Foundry, Newlyn, Microsoft, Monotype, NaN Foundry, Rosetta, TypeTogether, Typotheque and Tiro Typeworks.
Ben is based in Brighton, UK.
