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In many ways, graffiti is letterform innovation in its purest form. Its practitioners—known as writers—are constantly inventing new ways to depict the alphabet and its combinations, developing intensely personal styles while pushing the boundaries of legibility. Similar things are said about calligraphy, lettering, and type design—all of which fill design collections—and yet graffiti is commonly separated from these traditional crafts, and often ignored by museums except for work broadly defined as “street art.”

Accompanied by a celebratory publication, Type for All! Ten Years of Type West emphasizes the relationship between Letterform Archive’s collection and the typefaces created by the students in our year-long certificate program. With original work from every cohort since the program’s inception, the exhibition tracks the evolution of a pedagogy balancing historical reverence with contemporary practice and highlights a select showcase of the very best student typefaces.

Since January 2025, Letterform Archive’s reading room has served as a display case for small, short-run exhibitions. Our eighth show, Martin Venezky: Process Work, explores an intrinsic but lesser known aspect of Venezky’s creative practice: a body of collage and photographic work that exists as a byproduct of “finished” graphic design objects. This process work is the physical embodiment of the rigor and devotion Venezky puts into his craft, giving viewers a peek into how he creates his signature typographic compositions. The show highlights our rare collection of the artist’s process materials and underscores the Archive’s commitment to providing open access to both design artifacts and the creative practices that inform them.

In addition to our beautiful full-length titles, Letterform Archive Books has worked to bring our collection to you with a variety of delightful gift and stationery products created for lovers of great design. For our newest series, we scoured the stacks for objects that deserved to be reinterpreted in a truly special way. Crafted with the same care and rigor as our vibrant facsimile editions, our collection of Creative Papers adapts works by key figures from design history for use in today’s creative endeavors.

Before design historians became enamored with husband-and-wife creative teams like Charles and Ray Eames, Dorothy Shepard and Otis “Shep” Shepard created some of the most iconic American designs of the 1930s through the mid-20th century. These two powerfully talented commercial artists spearheaded a transition to modernist aesthetics in American advertising. From chewing gum packaging and beer ads to a luxury island, they designed major brand campaigns and experiences across the country.

Spanning stylistic and topical boundaries, Letterform Archive’s collection often invites unexpected and evocative connections. Seen Together is a new blog series featuring our favorite object pairings—works that may come from very different times and places, yet sit next to each other in dialogue on a tour table.