This website is a love letter to typography.

For two months, design students at BSU spent many sleepless nights — bleary-eyed but determined — as they focused on showcasing one of the most subtle, but vitally important aspects of design: typography (a.k.a. 'fonts' for all you unlettered masses ).

Students researched the most utilized typefaces in contemporary design and created webpages that emphasized the best parts of each typeface. Every composition, image, video and line of code was created from scratch by the students. Despite the incessant background noise of the covid-19, they rocked up to class, pandemic-or-shine, to create a diverse catalog of typography.

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The inspiration for the name of this site came from John Coltrane's 1965 masterpiece A Love Supreme. The album is heralded as a seminal work of jazz and improvisation from one of the G.O.A.Ts (greatest of all time). In A Love Supreme, Coltrane creates a host of complex rhythms from a deceptively simple motif. The work has a "free-wheeling openness which allowed the musicians...to build a four-part suite around a relatively basic musical idea." ¹

This idea — building complexity from simplicity and subtlety — seemed like the perfect metaphor for the way that designers use typography. On the surface, a typeface is just a bunch of letters, but when it's used in just the right way, a typeface can act as the timbre of our written words. At its core, A Type Supreme is a humble ode to one of the hearts of design: typography.

Have a look around and enjoy the fruits of the students' pandemic labor.