Orgs/Education
EZHISHIN, Type Drives Culture Conference, Native North American Edition
Ezhishin, Ojibwe for “s/he leaves a mark,” held in November 2022, was a formative online conference on Native North American Typography hosted by the Type Directors Club and co-curated by Neebinnaukzhik Southall and Ksenya Samarskaya. With the support of Google, the TDC was able to make these recordings available for the wider public on YouTube.
Native North American Type & Type Designers
This directory was created in coordination with Ezhishin.
BIPOC Design History is an educational platform, which offers a series of live and previously recorded design history classes, facilitated by Polymode. BIPOC Design History was founded due to the frustrations and glaring gaps in design representation for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook, by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, an award-winning design anthropologist, educator, author, and strategic consultant, is a guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.
Designed to be Red: Native American & Indigenous Poster Works
The Designed to be Red: Native American & Indigenous Poster Works exhibition is curated by Brian Johnson (Monacan Indian Nation) for Poster House, NYC, running September 25, 2026–February 21, 2027.
Designed to Be Red: Native American & Indigenous Graphic Works
The book Designed to be Red: Native American & Indigenous Graphic Works, by Brian Johnson (Monacan Indian Nation), edited by Heidi Brandow (Diné & Kānaka Maoli), with additional edits by Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Chippewas of Rama First Nation) is the first major publication dedicated to Native graphic design, slated for release in 2026. From the back cover:
“Design history has a problem. Native American and Indigenous peoples have been making decisions about form, function, communication, and meaning for millennia—and the canon has looked right through them. Designed to Be Red refuses that erasure. Spanning nearly fourteen centuries and more than eighty Tribes and Nations, this book argues that Native American and Indigenous peoples have always been designers—and that design history should reflect that truth. From wampum belts to contemporary typefaces, from resistance posters to language-reclamation projects, the works gathered here are acts of sovereignty, survivance, and joy. Organized across four thematic sections—and anchored by a conversation among six Native designers working today—this volume does not ask to be included in the canon. It indicts it. The maker was once known. That erasure was a choice. So is this correction. The title is a homophone: Designed to Be Red is designed to be read. These works demand to be looked at—and looked at again.”
The People’s Graphic Design Archive
The People’s Graphic Design Archive is a crowd-sourced virtual archive of inclusive graphic design history. The Archive includes everything from finished projects to process, photos, correspondence, oral histories, anecdotes, articles, essays, and other supporting material.
Letterform Archive is a nonprofit center for inspiration, education, publishing, and community in graphic design.
Native art is rarely taught in depth and even more rarely written about with care. When writing about Indigenous artists does appear in mainstream spaces, it is often rushed, poorly fact-checked and filtered through tourist expectations rather than Native voices. In 2013, artist, writer, and curator America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) launched First American Art Magazine, a publication that centers Native people, perspectives, and scholarship while covering the full spectrum of Indigenous creative work across the Americas.
Languagegeek is dedicated to the promotion of Indigenous languages – primarily those of North America. Languagegeek provides free fonts and free keyboard layouts which try to cover all of the characters (alphabetical letters/Syllabics) necessary for writing Native languages. Syllabics (Algonquian, Athapaskan, Inuit, Cherokee) take centre stage with type faces in new and innovative styles. Several fonts are also available for those languages which use a Roman orthography but require a number of diacritic marks or special characters.
The Decolonizing, or puncturing, Design Reader
An in-progress, collaborative project since 2018 started by Ramon Tejada in collaboration with many people.
Decentering Whiteness in Design History Resources
This is a bibliography meant to help instructors of design history decenter whiteness in their classes. It’s a Google Doc and anyone is welcome to use it for non-commercial purposes: i.e., to share it, download it, contribute to it, participate in editing it, copy it, or repurpose it.
Programs and Scholarships
The Donald Knuth & Charles Bigelow Type Design Incubator (KBI)
The Donald Knuth & Charles Bigelow Type Design Incubator (KBI) is powered by SILICON at Stanford University, in partnership with Words of Type and Letterform Archive. The program is where equity in type design meets the urgent need to preserve and advance digitally disadvantaged and underrepresented languages and scripts.
Type West BIPOC/Equity Scholarship | https://letterformarchive.org/type-west-faq/
Type West is Letterform Archive’s year-long postgraduate certificate program in type design — in-person in San Francisco or online, worldwide. The Archive provides one BIPOC/Equity Scholarship at full tuition for each cohort (Online and In-Person).
Cheryl Lynn Rutledge Northern Indigenous Student Award
The Cheryl Lynn Rutledge Northern Indigenous Student Award was created through a generous donation from Mark Rutledge CDP, to support an Indigenous design student, (with preference given to students from the North West Territories, Yukon and Nunavut) pursuing an education in graphic / communication design at a Canadian post-secondary college or university.
AIGA Worldstudio DxD Scholarship
AIGA believes all students deserve access to design education. The AIGA Worldstudio D×D Scholarships aim to increase diversity in the design profession by creating equitable opportunities for the next generation of creative talent. Scholarships are awarded annually to students enrolled at colleges and universities in the U.S. who demonstrate a commitment to positive social change, environmental responsibility, and cultural awareness through the practice of visual communication, including photography, illustration or graphic design.
QTBIPOC Design Fellowship Program
Nine-month fellowship program for early to mid-career QTBIPOC designers. The fellowship will empower designers to transform their careers, uplevel their skills, and elevate their impact on their communities and the design industry.
Groups
Indigenous Graphic Designers on Facebook
RGD BIPOC Designers Virtual Community
The Association of Registered Graphic Designers (RGD) is Canada’s largest professional association for graphic designers. A vibrant and inclusive community for RGD Members who identify as Black, Indigenous and/or People of Colour (BIPOC) to connect, share experiences and access valuable resources. This space is dedicated to fostering belonging, amplifying underrepresented voices and championing equity within the design industry.