Lorena Howard-Sheridan

Profile

Mexican American designer living in Seattle, and current Chair of Design at Cornish College of the Arts. She divides her time between teaching and running a small publishing house, Salted Caramel Books, specialized in collaborative and experimental projects.

Lorena grew up in Mexico City, where she became a graphic designer and worked for a few years before going to grad-school in Basel, Switzerland. She tried her luck in illustration, advertisement, packaging, film production and even a little journalism, settling for Identity and Publication design. The contrast between the eclectic Mexico and the analytical Swiss mentality has been the perfect playground for the kind of work that she wants to do, always with an emphasis on exploration and experimentation.

Some of her clients and partners have been The House of Mexico in Paris, The National University of Mexico, The Octavio Paz Foundation, The University of Guadalajara Press, and Rochester University Press, among other institutions. Her work has been recognized by Quorum (Mexico), BoNE (Best of New England), the Society of Typographic Arts, and Independent Publisher Awards.

As an addition to her typography courses, Lorena has lectured internationally on the subject of Mexican Street Lettering, and published the book Sideway Glances. She has also published  Modular Type Elements, a workbook about modular lettering, in collaboration with Punchpress, in Austin, Texas.

When it comes to typography, Lorena is interested in exploring the boundaries between text and image: from the small acts of reading that take place in the presence of random letterforms, to the loss of legibility in abstract forms, even when they give away their alphabetic nature. Our writing system is stubbornly abstract, but the mind is instinctively figurative, so the forms of characters can easily become a playground for imagination.