BTC Find and Seek is a font family born out of a pedagogical scavenger hunt. Developed with first-year students in the University of Cincinnati’s Communication Design program, the project asked first year designers to step away from their laptops, out into the world, and into the role of typographic archeologists. The assignment: hunt down fragments of found lettering in the wild, ghost signs, packaging detritus, hand-painted anomalies, municipal signage, garage sale flyers. Anything with typographic DNA was fair game.
Each discovery was documented, catalogued, and then put under the digital scalpel. Students cleaned up their findings, extended them into complete alphabets, and transformed them into functional fonts. The exercise became an initiation as it’s equal parts type history, digital craft, and collective authorship.
BTC Find and Seek demonstrates how type design can be more than drawing curves in a vacuum. It is about listening to the vernacular, letting it interrupt contemporary design education, and turning the overlooked into working tools. The result is a family of Frankenstein-esque, yet oddly coherent typefaces.
38 Weights
Created 09/2025
Designed by 37 Students across two sections of Typography 1