The Malee Scholarship
The Recipient
Maryam Golpayegani
Maryam shares her story of growing up in Tehran, Iran, and the complexities of balancing her deep love and pride for her country with the political challenges it faces. Despite these difficulties, her positivity and ambition remain unwavering. Since discovering type design years ago, Maryam has relentlessly pursued her dream of becoming a full-time type designer.
Maryam Golpayegani is a graphic designer and type designer from Iran. While studying Graphic Design at the University of Tehran, her interest in Arabic calligraphy deepened, particularly in the Nastaliq style, which she practiced with the help of her university professor Sedaghat Jabbari. After graduating, she secured an internship in type design with Bahman Eslami, where she gained technical skills and learned about the process of designing typefaces. She now assists Eslamion in various type design projects and is working towards making type design her full-time profession, with a focus on Arabic type design.
We are so proud to recognize someone with Maryam’s talent and drive to preserve her culture’s typographic history. Her story and her mission are equally inspiring, and we have no doubt she will go far in her pursuits in type design. We are delighted to present her as our next Malee Scholarship recipient.
The Finalists
The Malee Scholarship recognizes three Finalists who are committed to a career in type design and educating the next generation of lettering artists and type designers. This year, each finalist will receive a $2,000 grant from sponsor David Jonathan Ross that will go towards their type design education, a copy of the second edition of Designing Type by Karen Cheng, and a copy of Sharp Type Volume One.
Xicheng Yang
Xicheng Yang is a typeface designer from China, completed her Masters in Typeface Design at the University of Reading, UK, and is now a PhD student in the same department. Her research focuses on developing digital typefaces for the Tangut script, an extinct script used primarily in 11th-13th century China. She has redesigned Noto Serif Tangut for Google Fonts at @liuzhao_studio. She won awards for her typeface designs, including New York TDC awards and Tokyo TDC for AraTangut, and New York TDC Young Ones awards for Lyean. She also presents her research at conferences, promoting the cultural heritage of Tangut and other minority scripts in China.
Adriana Garcidueñas
Adriana Garcidueñas is a graphic designer and type designer. Studied in the TypeWest program in 2023 with a full BIPOC scholarship and also she studied at Type@Cooper Condensed this past summer. Currently she works for the arabic type foundry ArabicTypography.com directed by Tarek Atrissi doing both arabic and latin typography; she also very recently started freelancing for DOT Type Foundry (Death Of Typography) located in Singapore. She can be found being Teacher Assistant or attending to type, lettering or calligraphy workshops and when she finally has some free time she watches BTS videos ♥. (Yes, the Korean boyband).
Arlyn Ramos
Arlyn has been doing branding, graphic design, web, ux, and lettering for more than a decade. She has designed for clients big and small, from beloved local small businesses to Hawaiian Airlines. She recently graduated from Type@Cooper's Condensed Type Program with a certificate in typeface design. At Cooper Union she juggled side trips to bakeries and neighborhood adventures while working on her typeface project for school. She often smuggled bites of pastries in between glyph-making and type critiques. Born in the Philippines and raised in Hawai‘i, Arlyn hopes to contribute meaningfully to the type community in the ways she can as an Ilokano Fil-Am woman designer from Kalihi. She aims to create representation for people like herself, advocate for better language support and the design needs of her community, create thoughtfully crafted custom type for local Hawai‘i brands, and share her learnings about design in her writing.
Special Recognition
This year The Malee Scholarship recognizes Purvi Kothari, Tatiana Lopez, Kotomi Morrill, Soniya Stella, Shrishti Vajpai and Junyi Zhu for their achievements and contributions to the type design industry.