Manuel López Rocha: Tuki — PREORDER

PREORDERS SHIP IN JUNE June 2026, English, Spanish, Epi-Olmec, 5 x 8 in., 28 pages, riso, softcover, staple-bound Edition of 200 Design: Manuel López Rocha Printing: Irrelevant Press Of the 7000+ human languages in the world, between 50–100 are supported digitally, with 10 languages making up 82% of all internet content. This booklet is part of series that highlights the work of designers who are creating digital typefaces for languages or writing systems that are underrepresented or entirely unsupported within current operating systems, keyboards, and digital technologies at large. The process for developing such typefaces requires intensive research, often with ongoing community collaboration and feedback. By providing a digital application for these languages, the type designers featured in this series contribute to the longevity of a language, and in turn, its cultural knowledges, oral histories, and ways of thinking. Manuel López Rocha's Tuki is a type design project aimed at supporting the writing of Mixe languages. It constitutes the first typeface family to incorporate glyphs from the Epi-Olmec, considered one of the earliest scripts in the Americas. Tuki is grounded in extensive linguistic, historical, and documentary research focused on reinterpreting a writing system that had fallen out of use. Today, this system is being reappropriated by the Mixe people as part of broader efforts to reclaim and sustain their cultural and historical heritage, making it clear that writing in the region existed prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet. This project is made in partnership with SILICON (the Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media). Manuel López Rocha is a graphic designer, type designer, educator, and researcher from Xalapa. He was a founding member of the Fontstage collective and has collaborated with the type foundries AndRepeat Inc and PampaType. For several years he has collaborated with linguists and native speakers to create typographic solutions designed to meet the needs of Indigenous languages across Mexico and the Americas. He is currently a partner and designer at Estudio Cuatro Ojos, teaches at Universidad Veracruzana and Universidad Anáhuac Veracruz, co-organizes the Multilingüe conference, and is part of the Letrástica collective, where he coordinates a local chapter. Stanford Initiative on Language Inclusion and Conservation in Old and New Media (SILICON) believes that your “home screen” should feel like home. SILICON is a Stanford Presidential initiative, supported by UNESCO, that focuses on advancing digital inclusion and empowerment for the more than 6000 languages left behind in the Digital Age. SILICON works with communities, linguists, technologists, and more to develop the foundational building blocks of the digital age, including typefaces, keyboards, and UX/UI datasets.