Kent Lew

Kent Lew has been a designer for nearly three decades. After graduating from Willamette University with a degree in Art, he worked for many years as a graphic designer and illustrator. Coming from a family of writers and editors, it was inevitable that he would gravitate toward the design of words and text. So eventually he turned his attention to book design, later becoming the creative director at Storey Publishing. Kent now works mostly as a type designer, font engineer, and typographic consultant.

He has provided design and production assistance to the Font Bureau, Carter & Cone, and Morisawa. His first typeface, Whitman, was awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Type Design by the Type Directors Club in 2002 and was published by the Font Bureau the following year. Several styles of Whitman Display and Whitman Banner were subsequently commissioned by both newspapers and magazines, among them the Minneapolis Star Tribune, New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, and Fortune. More recently, Kent designed the Haffner Text font family for TIME magazine’s 2015 redesign, followed by Haffner Display fonts for the 2021 design refresh. He also designed the Clarimo family of fonts for Morisawa Inc. of Japan.

He currently lives with his wife and two pugs in a ca. 1800s tavern in a small rural town in Berkshires of western Massachusetts.