nr.68 Women in Type | Whose Voices Get Seen (and Heard)?

Whose voices are seen and heard in type design? Who is remembered, and who is elevated as a reference? This edition of WiT Talks tackles the crucial question of representation within the type industry. Representation is of paramount importance: it defines who has a place in the industry and who has the power to shape it.
This WiT Talks panel examines the politics of representation and its importance for women designers around the world. Organised by Women in Type, a platform led by Flavia Zimbardi, this roundtable brings together Aleksandra Samuļenkova, Lara Captan and Pooja Saxena.
An invitation to reinvent the structures of the type design industry so that the future is written through multiple voices.

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WiT Talks is a panel series spotlighting authorship, process, and feminist practices in type and beyond. Inviting women designers and allies to share perspectives and experiences on their creative journey, and its connection to larger questions of cultural influence and the politics of representation. This edition, Designing Visibility: Whose Voices Get Seen (and Heard)?, brings together Aleksandra Samuļenkova, Lara Captan, and Pooja Saxena for a conversation around the structures behind recognition: who is remembered, who becomes a reference, and how designers can actively reshape the narratives and histories their work sustains.

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Women in Type is a feminist platform led by Flavia Zimbardi, built to address gender imbalance in the type industry. Through collaboration, publishing, curated events, and editorial projects, it amplifies the voices of female-identifying designers while fostering community and building new networks across the global community, particularly for practitioners from the Global South.
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Flavia Zimbardi is an independent type designer and visual artist from Rio de Janeiro whose work connects cultural heritage and activism. Founder of the feminist initiative Women in Type and author of the publishing platform Contraforma, she partners with foundries including Commercial Type, Frere-Jones, Adobe Fonts, and Google Fonts, and with clients such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Penguin Random House, Pentagram, and Jones Knowles Ritchie. Her work has received recognition from the ADC, Tipos Latinos Biennial, and with Lygia, she became the first Brazilian woman to have a typeface awarded by the Type Directors Club.
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Lara Captan is originally from Beirut, and has been living in Amsterdam since 2013. She spends her days in her studio drawing Arabic fonts and working on Ama Foundry, her independent type foundry that she started in 2023. Throughout her career, she's been exploring unique methods to create Arabic typefaces that challenge technology while making sure the script stays authentic to its roots. She also co-created the first international program to teach these methods to aspiring type designers. Lara enjoys collaborating with designers across the world, mentoring students, dancing, and being by the Mediterranean Sea.
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Aleksandra Samuļenkova is a Latvian-born type designer based in the Netherlands. She designs for Latin, Cyrillic, and (occasionally) Greek scripts, and consults on the former two. She is known for her award-winning typeface Pilot and for her Cyrillic and Greek extensions of notable typefaces such as IBM Plex. She also specializes in diacritics design and lectures on the subject at various institutions, including her alma mater, the Type and Media Master’s programme in The Hague. This year, Aleksandra serves as Jury President for the TDC72 Type Design category.
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Pooja Saxena is a typeface designer, lettering artist, and typographer from India. She is best known for her work with Indic scripts and her writing on locally-rooted typographic cultures. She is part of the team at TypeTogether, where her recent work includes Playpen Sans Devanagari (2025) and Bree Devanagari (2026), and served as the co-editor of Primarium: Handwriting Education across Cultures and Continents (2025). Pooja also runs an independent research and design practice, Matra Type, and is the author of India Street Lettering: A Journey Through Typographic Craft & Culture (2026).

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