Ben Mitchell

Ben Mitchell is a typeface designer and researcher specialising in the scripts of Southeast Asia, a regions he has been visiting for more than 25 years. He has designed and consulted on fonts for Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer, Cham, Thai Noi / Lao Buhan, Tham, and Vietnamese, and regularly makes research trips to Southeast Asia to study typography, lettering, and handwriting to inform his professional practice.

Ben aims to base his design work on firm foundations by discussing languages, palaeography, and current typographic conventions with academics, fellow designers, software engineers, and publishers who work with Southeast Asian writing systems. He also spends time intensively studying manuscripts to understand the derivation and evolution of scripts, particularly in minority communities, and has written several Unicode proposals to get these languages digitally enabled.

Ben runs his own foundry, The Fontpad, based in Brighton, UK, and has worked on text, display, and user interface (UI) fonts, script extensions, retail and custom designs, and has consulted on existing non-Latin typefaces. Clients include Adobe, Apple, Black Foundry, Bold Monday, Brody Associates, bbox, Colophon Foundry, Google, Grab, Hoefler & Co, Indian Type Foundry, Microsoft, Newlyn, Monotype, NaN Foundry, Rosetta, TypeTogether, and Tiro Typeworks.