Northfield School — Typography, taught in order
Visual concept preview of the Education Course template's Home page: Opens on the prospectus, shows the six-module ladder at a glance, puts the school’s record up on the board, and closes on enrolment. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
Northfield is a small school for people who already set type at work and suspect they are guessing. Six modules, taken in sequence across one term: drawing letters by hand, spacing them, and setting them on a page — each module critiqued twice by people who do this for a living.
Graduates now set type at
Each module assumes the one before it. You cannot space letters you have not drawn, and you cannot set a page you cannot space — so they are taught in that order, and nobody is waved past a module they have not done.
Letterforms and the hand
Weeks 1–3 · Draw the Latin lowercase by hand until the stem weight stops wandering.
Spacing, fitting, and the word
Weeks 4–7 · Fit letters into words, and words into a line that reads at a glance.
The text block
Weeks 8–11 · Measure, leading, and the grey of a paragraph judged from across the room.
Hierarchy and reading order
Weeks 12–14 · Decide what is read first, then prove it with size, weight, and space.
The grid, across many pages
Weeks 15–18 · Build a structure that survives sixty pages and three other people.
Type on screens
Weeks 19–22 · Set type for a measure you do not control, and test it on real devices.
Every module ends in something physical: drawn letters, a specimen line, a typeset spread, a bound book. It goes on the wall, gets read by eight other people, and comes back to you with notes in the margin.
The archive downstairs holds every final sheet the school has taken in since 2012. Students are welcome to work through it, and most of them do.
Broad-nib and pencil exercises from Module one, kept in your folder.
One line, reworked until the spacing stops arguing with itself.
The same four hundred words, set seven ways, defended once.
Short, printed and sewn in the workshop downstairs.
Figures the school keeps because prospective students ask for them, written up at the end of each term.
We do not publish placement rates as a promise. A school can teach you to space a line; it cannot make anyone hire you.
- weeks from the first letter to the final critique
- 22
- people in a critique group, at most
- 9
- years teaching the same six modules
- 14
- student sheets in the school archive
- 1,180
I arrived able to pick a typeface and unable to say why. I left able to set a book — and, far more useful, able to explain every decision to a client who disagreed with me.
The critique is the course. Everything else is preparation for standing next to your own work while eight people read it slowly.
The syllabus and its order are identical in all three. What changes is how much of it you commit to at once.
Module pass
Paid per module, in sequence.
- Any single module, taken in sequence
- Two tutor critiques on your own work
- The full handout set for that module
- Carry on to the next module when you are ready
Full cohort
The whole course, one cohort, start to finish.
- All six modules in order, across one term
- A fixed critique group of nine
- Two tutor critiques in every module
- Saturday studio access for the whole term
- The school’s own certificate of completion
Studio year
For people rebuilding a practice.
- The full cohort, then a second term of studio work
- A named mentor for the whole year
- A portfolio review at the end of each term
- A standing place in the graduate critique
Short answers. The longer ones are on the enrolment page.
Nine places to a critique group, and the evening cohort usually fills first. The curriculum is worth reading before you commit — it is the whole course, in order, with nothing held back.