Ben Mitchell

Ben Mitchell is a type designer based in Brighton, UK. He holds an MA in typeface design from the University of Reading.

Since 2017, Ben has enjoyed running the Fontpad Ltd, a small company making fonts for Southeast Asian scripts. His professional practice is informed by extensive research, regular trips to the region and collaboration with an international team. He has been visiting Southeast Asia for 20 years.

Ben aims to base his design work on firm foundations, through discussion with academics, designers, software engineers and publishers who work with Southeast Asian writing systems. He has helped the Unicode Consortium take poorly-documented scripts through the encoding process and is currently working on a proposal and fonts for the ancient Pallava script.

Ben has worked on text, display and user interface (UI) fonts, script extensions, retail and custom designs, and has consulted on existing non-Latin typefaces. Experience includes Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer, Cham, Thai Noi (Lao Buhan), Tham and Vietnamese. Clients include Adobe, Black Foundry, Bold Monday, Brody Associates, bbox, Colophon Foundry, Google, Grab, Hoefler & Co, Indian Type Foundry, Microsoft, Miles Newlyn, Monotype, Rosetta Type Foundry, TypeTogether and Tiro Typeworks.

Alongside the development of new type families, Ben teaches type design workshops, mentors students and professional type designers around the world, and enjoys talking about type at conferences.