Ligatures Summer School 2026

The Ligatures Special Interest Group invites you to Porto for the third edition of the Ligatures Summer School. Join us from July 15–17, 2026, for three days on the materialities of language — where graphic heritage, visual communication and emerging technologies reshape written and typographic artifacts.

Intensive hands-on workshops

Exploring topics that range from creative computation and post-digital letterpress to contemporary typographic design.

Post-graduate communications

A dedicated academic track for emerging research and speculative design.

International keynotes

Insights from leading figures in reading research, legibility, and computational editorial design.

Speaker announcements, registration and the full programme are coming soon.

Transitions explores the cultural and technological realignments defining our era. As we navigate the accelerating shift from human-centric craftsmanship to AI-driven computational systems, the very mechanics of communication are transforming. Yet this threshold is not an erasure — it is a vital space for the reconstruction and reinterpretation of our cultural legacies.

Tracing the continuous journey of reading and writing from their tangible, material roots to their complex, intellectual futures, Transitions reflects on how we preserve, adapt, and reinvent our visual heritage. It is a platform to interrogate the shifting power dynamics of contemporary culture and to actively design the structural and typographic literacies of tomorrow.

We invite researchers, designers, and students (graduate and post-graduate) to submit proposals for the Ligatures Summer School 2026 academic track, taking place on July 17, 2026.

Transitions explores the cultural and technological realignments defining our era.

Research into how technological tools and traditional material practices inform visual communication, pedagogy, and design research is welcome — and especially how transitions between practices, culture and perceptions are occurring.

Selected authors will be invited to expand their communications into full papers for a peer-reviewed digital publication hosted on the U.Porto OJS platform (expected December 2026).

We are accepting Extended Abstracts (including necessary visual documentation and images) for 5-minute, 15-slide presentations during the event. Authors are encouraged to submit proposals specific to this topic, or on relevant topics within the Ligatures SIG mission.