From the Bench of Katie Leavens
From the Bench is SFCB's series of short studio tours with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.
May’s guest is Katie Leavens, a freelance illustrator and calligrapher based in San Francisco. She thrives on complex projects that blend her background in design, illustration, and lettering. She has a passion for studying lettering from the past, particularly in exploring how medieval illumination techniques can inform contemporary design. Her approach results in work that is both deeply rooted in tradition and strikingly modern.
Katie’s lettering practice spans everything from corporate events—where she provides custom invitations and live lettering sessions—to intricate, heirloom-quality pieces like diplomas and family trees. She approaches each project with a holistic design mindset, ensuring harmony in composition while adding unexpected flourishes that bring a piece to life.
A dedicated member of the lettering community, Katie has served on the Friends of Calligraphy council since 2019. She leads their social media efforts, manages their class registrations, and is currently co-coordinating their upcoming member exhibit at the San Francisco Public Library. Since 2020, she has taught calligraphy at institutions such as San Francisco City College Extension, Friends of Calligraphy, San Francisco Center for the Book, and Letterform Archive. Her class help students develop both technical confidence and their artistic voice.
Like many artists in San Francisco, Katie has learned to make the most of small spaces. Her 50-square-foot studio—carved out of her living room—a case-study in organization and creative problem-solving. Her studio may be smaller than a walk-in closet, but that doesn’t limit the scale of her creativity—or the impact of her work.
You can find out more at her website, kleavens.com.
Please visit our Vimeo page to see our past tours, previously known as Shelter in Studio.
Thursday, May 1, 2025
12:30 PM (Pacific Time)
This is a free online event.
Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time (two hours before the start time).
In the Studio: Devils Night!
In the Studio: Devils Night!
SFCB is pleased to invite all interested volunteers to a Devils Night of fun and cleaning in the print studio on Tuesday, May 6 from 5-8pm. Bring some grubby clothes and good stories to swap as we dig through our cases and galleys to get a bit dirty while helping to make the studio a bit cleaner.
St. Rita's Amazing Traveling Bookstore at SFCB
Bookstore proprietress Rita Collins will be bringing her bookstore-on-wheels back to SFCB! Visiting 23 cities in six and a half weeks, St. Rita's Amazing Traveling Bookstore and Textual Apothecary will be open for business in our parking lot. Visitors are invited to peruse used books (Fiction? Biographies? Art? Kids books? St. Rita's got 'em!) and other printed paper items for sale. If you've never visited a bookstore-on-wheels, this event is for you!
Location
San Francisco Center for the Book
375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
Sunday, April 20, 2025
10 am–4 pm
Free and open to the public. No RSVP required!
West Berkeley Community Print Festival 2025
Visit the SFCB table at Kala Art Institute’s annual printmaking festival!
From community art workshops and artist demonstrations to artist vendors and print studio tours, stop by throughout the day and see what’s happening as Kala Art Institute brings together the local community of artists, youth, and families for a day of sharing and experiencing art in West Berkeley.
Find the full schedule of events here.
Location
Kala Gallery & Community Classroom
2990 San Pablo Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94702
Saturday, April 5, 2025
12 pm–4 pm
Free and open to the public. No RSVP required!
From the Bench of Mita Mahato
From the Bench is SFCB's series of short studio tours with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.
April's guest is Mita Mahato, a comix artist and poet who assembles her panels and pages with cut and collaged papers. Her work joins fragments of used and discarded materials—old newspapers, obsolete maps, junk mail, packaging scraps—in poetic experiments that dramatize entangled processes of death and renewal, specifically within the context of ecosystemic loss under capitalism.
Her new book Arctic Play is published by The 3rd Thing, and her poetry comix have appeared in places including PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, Coast/NoCoast, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades.
In her talk, Mahato will share insight into how place-making inspires the hybrid poetics in Arctic Play and its companion activity book "TROPSSAP" which will be featured in the upcoming SFCB gallery exhibition Crossing the Line: The Passport Re-Imagined, April 19-June 15, 2025.
You can find out more at her website, mitamahato.com.
Please visit our Vimeo page to see our past tours, previously known as Shelter in Studio.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
12:30 PM (Pacific Time)
This is an online event.
Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time, two hours before the start time.
Tension, Harmony, Movement: Exploring the Works in OPEN•SET
Join OPEN SET organizer Lang Ingalls and exhibiting artist Beth Redmond—recipient of the Highly Commendable award in the Design Tension in Foretelling Content category—for a discussion on contemporary design bookbinding and selected works from the OPEN SET exhibition.
Exploring themes of tension, harmony, and movement, the evening will highlight prizewinning works and design bindings that feature unique structures and content. Don't miss this rare opportunity to view these exquisite pieces outside their exhibition cases!
Doors open at 6:00 pm; event will begin promptly at 6:30 pm.
Location
San Francisco Center for the Book
375 Rhode Island Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
Thursday, March 27, 2025
6:00 PM
Drawing on Pop Culture with Gerard Huerta
A legendary lettering artist takes us on a 50-year journey through iconic logos, album covers, and the shift from analog to digital tools.
Renowned artist Gerard Huerta has applied the art of hand lettering across a diverse range of commercial industries over the past 50 years. From corporate logos and magazine mastheads to Swiss Army watch dials, movie titles, advertising, and record album covers, Huerta’s distinctive style has shaped visual culture.
Join us as we explore his creative process, from initial sketches to final inkings and color artwork. You’ll also gain insight into the evolution to digital tools and how this technological shift has transformed his approach to lettering and design.
Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.
Gerard Huerta is a designer of letter forms. Born and raised in southern California he graduated from Art Center College of Design and began his career at CBS Records in New York creating artwork and iconic logos for Boston, Blue Oyster Cult, and later Foreigner, ACDC and many others.
He left CBS to expand his work beyond the recording and movie industry to design logos for HBO, CBS Records Masterworks, Spelling Entertainment, Nabisco, Calvin Klein’s Eternity, The National Guitar Museum, Monterey Peninsula Country Club, the mastheads of Time, Money, People, Architectural Digest and many others. He designed watch dials for the Original Swiss Army Watch and their complete line for fourteen years and also created original product illustrations.
Besides his graphic work, Huerta also designed the multi-necked fully-playable stringed instrument known as The Rock Ock for the National Guitar Museum, which is on tour along with his vintage guitar art. His work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
Presented by the Letterform Archive.
From the Bench of Rae Lanzerotti
Welcome to From the Bench, SFCB's series of short studio visits with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.
This month we'll chat with Rae Lanzerotti, a disabled access artist and maker of memoir comics and zines based in San Francisco.
Rae Lanzerotti uses disability access tools to make touchable, audible, and graphic memoir comics, zines, and art books. They have shown multimodal pieces locally at the Museum of Craft and Design and the gallery of Ruth’s Table. Rae's memoir comic, “Embodied,” at the forefront of innovating accessible comics, will be featured in the display ‘Zines Forever: DIY Publications and Disability Justice (Wellcome Collection, London UK, March - Sept 2025).
As a 2025 “Hearts in San Francisco” artist, Rae’s heart is always here. You can find out more at their website, rlanzerotti.com.
Please visit our Vimeo page to see our past tours, previously known as Shelter in Studio.
March 6th, 2025
12:30 PM
Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time, two hours before the start time.
In the Studio: Devils Night!
In the Studio: Devils Night!
SFCB is pleased to invite all interested volunteers to a Devils Night of fun and cleaning in the print studio on Tuesday, February 4th from 5-8pm. Bring some grubby clothes and good stories to swap as we dig through our cases and galleys to get a bit dirty while helping to make the studio a bit cleaner.
Thursday, May 6, 2025
6–8 pm
Sign up here.
Alfabeti Modernisti Italiani with Riccardo Olocco, Valentina Casali, Giulio Galli
Presented by the Letterform Archive. Learn more and register here.
Rediscover the bold, geometric letterforms that defined an era of Italian design.
For many years, Luca Lattuga of Anonima Impressori has been collecting and cataloguing modernist wood type (and some metal type) produced in Italy, which were very popular in the 1930s. Alongside Nebiolo’s bestsellers such as Neon, Italy saw the emergence of a plethora of original wood type designs. Often created by amateurs rather than professional type designers, these typefaces followed the European trend towards geometric lettering and can be seen as a local expression of vernacular typography.
Known today as “rationalist” typefaces (since the term “modernist” has never found favor among Italian critics and historians), they were widely used in advertisements, leaflets, posters, as well as on title pages, book covers, and magazine mastheads. While the Fascist regime promoted geometric letterforms — cunningly adopting the most advanced Art Deco trends in architecture and graphics — these typefaces enjoyed popularity across all levels of Italian society. They were not perceived as symbols of the regime and remained in use well into the 1960s.
Luca will present his findings in a book to be published by Lazy Dog Press in 2026. To support his research into these forgotten types, CAST has created digital revivals of the best designs Luca has uncovered. These revivals, released as Alfabeti Modernisti, are now available as part of CAST’s typeface collection and can also be accessed on Adobe Fonts. The collection was designed by a team of CAST members and collaborators, following a faithful and respectful approach to the original sources.
Three members of CAST will introduce the collection and present their revival work, focusing on the small changes that have been made to the original design in order to produce digital fonts that meet the expectations of contemporary users.
Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.
BOOK TALK: Julie Beeler & Wynne Au-Yeung
Join author, artist, and educator Julie Beeler and book designer Wynne Au-Yeung for an engaging discussion about their collaboration on the bestselling book The Mushroom Color Atlas. This evening event will feature a captivating slideshow presentation and an informal conversation, offering attendees a behind-the-scenes look at the book design process—from initial concepts to the finished product—and the discoveries and creative decisions that brought the project to life.
SFCB will have copies of this book for sale during the event, and in our online Biblioshop.
About the Presenters
Julie Beeler is an acclaimed designer, artist, and educator inspired by the natural world. Her work has been featured by The New York Times, Popular Science, The Smithsonian Institution and The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, among others.
Julie created the Mushroom Color Atlas website to unveil and celebrate the resplendent chromatic universe hidden within the fungi kingdom, making it accessible to people around the world. Her book The Mushroom Color Atlas, recently published by Chronicle Books, is a comprehensive primer on the universe of colors lurking inside fungi. It is equal parts art book, field guide, and dye-making workshop. In every form her effort is a timeless reference that will be used for years to come.
After a 20-year career at the vanguard of interactive design, Julie founded Bloom & Dye, a natural dye studio and farm in the Pacific Northwest ideally situated for foraging mushrooms, growing fresh-cut color, and creating fine art. She can be found online at juliebeeler.com.
Wynne Au-Yeung is a graphic designer at Chronicle Books and a mixed-media artist who specializes in creating designs that invite touch and interaction. With a passion for collaboration, she brings diverse ideas to life, making books more than just something to read—they’re experiences to explore.
Location
San Francisco Center for the Book
375 Rhode Island Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Friday, February 27, 2025
Doors will open at 6:00 pm; the event will start promptly at 6:30 pm.
From the Bench of Gino Robair
Welcome to From the Bench, SFCB's series of short studio visits with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.
This month we'll chat with Gino Robair, a papermaker, printer, composer, and percussionist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Gino Robair’s artistic practice examines how systems of human interaction are influenced by perceptions of materiality. His PhD research at the UC Davis focuses on papermaking and letterpress printing as forms of embodied choreography; a performative process that puts artists in conversation with their tools, materials, and ambient environment. The results of this interaction are ephemeral memory-objects carrying traces of their materialization that can be used as resources for interpretation within a performance context.
You can find out more at his website.
Please visit our Vimeo page to see past recordings, previously known as Shelter in Studio.
Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time, two hours before the start time.