Alphabettes Soup is Served!

a stack of three books showing the spine of Alphabettes Soup with the word ALPHABETTES set vertically on the spine. The cover is bright green and features a large A made of smaller characters and glyphs

Grab a spoon and get ready for some big SOUP updates!

On April 1, Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type was printed and bound at Gráfica Maiaduoro in Portugal. I was so fortunate to travel to sunny Porto with my daughter and hold the very first finished copy: a 2.4-pound, 400-page beauty! We held a soft launch on Thursday, April 2 at the Bikini Books HQ. Over forty people came, books were sold and signed, and it was an absolute thrill to share it with the world for the first time.

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Devanagari Typography 101: A guide for typesetting with Latin

Evolved from the Brahmi script, Devanagari is used to write Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit, and Nepali, and remains an important Indic script used in South Asia and beyond. Its technological advances have been slow, and design advances are just starting to pick up. South Asia, and specifically India, has a multilingual cultural landscape, and it is not uncommon for street signs, periodicals, newspapers, and other printed ephemera to typically use two to three languages—English and a regional language or two, or two to three regional languages together. While Indian street signs have long featured beautifully painted, built, or set Devanagari signs, often integrating Latin numbers or words seamlessly, translating this to digital typesetting has not been an equally easy task, owing to the differences in setting the two scripts, the difference in anatomy and reading of the scripts, and the limited availability of Devanagari fonts as compared to Latin. There are also knowledge gaps in multilingual typesetting where a script is often forced to follow Latin typesetting principles. This write-up aims to develop a guide for effectively setting Devanagari alongside Latin type, while honoring the nuances of both scripts.

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Process behind Dukat: shaping letters and ideas side by side

First ideas for the project emerged in the autumn of 2024. At the time, I was doing an internship at a French type design studio. Surrounded by the rich beauty of Paris and looking at typefaces every day, I felt an increasing urge to start working on a new typeface.

Typeface brief can take shape through different processes. In my case, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work on something experimental, a project that would create a dialogue between historical letterforms and contemporary approaches.

More specifically, I wanted to explore Vyaz, an ornamental writing style derived from Byzantine culture that played a significant role in the history of Ukrainian writing. In terms of character, I was drawn to something sharp, carved, chiseled.

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24-Hour Hang *In*: March 8, 2026

Since 2019, Alphabettes has spent nearly every International Women’s Day doing what it does best: hastily dis-organizing a 24-hour online hangout across timezones and continents with a loose schedule that anyone on the internet was welcome to join. We’d take a virtual type walk around Mumbai with Tanya. We’d join Romina and friends in Mexico City for an 8M March with handlettered signs from her community poster-making workshops. We’d hear cool conference stories from Theresa in San Francisco. We’d chit chat in Spanish for an hour with Laura and Dafne and Caro. We’d say hi to pets and babies and make breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, all at once. In 2026? Instead of hanging out, some of us decided we’re hanging in. Or maybe, hanging on. We’re still here, but for now, it’s ok to hang up the internet for the day or hang out in other ways. 

This International Women’s Day, I’ll be helping to bring a very hot soup to simmer. After two years of non-stop planning, writing, editing, organizing, emailing, type pairing, proofreading, and spreadsheeting, Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type, heads off to the printer very (very!) soon, after every tiny error has been uncovered in these 400 beautiful pages (🤞). Hang tight!

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