Letterform Archive seeks a Visitor Services Assistant to be the friendly and helpful face of the Archive, ensuring every guest has an inspirational experience.
Do you love good design? Do you believe the world needs a little more inspiration these days? Would you like to help make this happen?
Reporting to the Collections Programming Manager, the Visitor Services Assistant will be the first point of contact for phone calls, emails, and in-person visitors.
Rediscover Archive gems in a continuing series showcasing our most popular posts from Instagram and Twitter.
Welcome to our second installment of highlights from the Archive’s collection through the lens of social media. Joining our earlier post, these are some of the most loved and shared images from the last year or so.
At least twice a day we share items from the Letterform Archive collection on social media. Connecting with our community on these platforms has always been a big part of what we do, even before the physical library was open to the public. That said, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and there are plenty of Archive members, newsletter subscribers, and website visitors who don’t see all that good stuff we post there. Meanwhile, the limited canvas of social media doesn’t always do justice to a rare printed book or detailed piece of calligraphy. With that in mind, here’s the first in an ongoing series showcasing your favorite posts, reprised in expanded form on the blog.
Last summer, amid a long overdue racial reckoning in the United States, we republished a landmark 1968 article by Dorothy Jackson on “The Black Experience Graphic Design”, and asked 16 current design leaders to compare it to their own experience. Their stories spanned the gamut from exhaustion to hope. They shed light on the progress and stagnation of the design world, both academic and professional, and offered advice to organizations and individuals within and outside the BIPOC community. One thing we heard over and over again in their responses was the name Dr. Dori Tunstall.
Dr. Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, researcher, and educator. She is the first Black dean of a faculty of design anywhere in the world, a position she has held at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) in Toronto since 2016. From the moment she took the role she led a transformation of OCAD U’s equity practices that have become a model for many other organizations. In our interview she lays out six ideas from her own experience that other institutions can put into practice if they are serious about equity and liberation for BIPOC designers.
Web and print specimens showcase 14 original typefaces produced by recent graduates of our yearlong program in type design.
The Type West Class of 2020 dedicated a year to learning type design and history through hands-on workshops and in-depth instruction. Students trained with the best in the industry, including Grendl Löfkvist, James Edmondson, Graham Bradley, Kel Troughton, Maria Doreuli, and many guest instructors. The finale: creating an original typeface, from sketch to font.
At Letterform Archive, Type West students have access to an unparalleled typographic library as they research and create their own original typefaces. Librarians, curators, and other members of the Archive's knowledgeable staff guide students through thousands of type specimens, reference books, and original examples of lettering and graphic design.
We recently announced our long-awaited docent program! Applications are due June 15, 2021. Did you miss the info sessions? Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions.
A remarkable sculptural installation of 26 letters and 10 numbers will grace the walls of our new home.
In 2019, San Francisco paper artist Zai Divecha (she/her) created 36 letters and numbers for the 36 Days of Type challenge. Letterform Archive is proud to announce our acquisition of Quiet Type, which will be on permanent display in our new location. Collections Programming Manager sair goetz interviewed Zai.
Bring a rare piece of the Archive into your own home or office while supporting our mission: join our first-ever auction on May 12, 2021.
Letterform Archive has one of the world’s best collections of typographic history. We house over 60,000 objects aggregated from various sources and donors with overlapping interests. This often yields multiple copies of a book or print, and there are now hundreds of duplicates to be deaccessioned. Over the last five years we held several small sales, particularly of reference books and type foundry ephemera, but we reserved the rarest gems for a moment when we could offer them all together in a globally accessible auction.
At 4,000 years old, our cuneiform tablet is the collection’s oldest object. Now we know more about the messages it contains.
We like to change things up when setting tables for introductory visits, but most tours begin with an unassuming object that’s by far the Archive’s most ancient. Created in Mesopotamia around the second millennium BCE, our cuneiform tablet looks like a rough lump of hard clay, just big enough to rest in your palm. Closer inspection reveals a surface covered with sharp impressions — marks of what many consider the world’s first full writing system.
From Gutenberg to Granjon, new additions to the Online Archive represent major developments in letterpress printing.
In her recent update, librarian Kate Long mentioned the ways we use the Archive as a teaching tool, especially in our Survey of Type History for the MFA Design program at the California College of the Arts. Now in its third year, the course tells the story of design firsthand through a curated selection of artifacts from our collection. This year, of course, the pandemic is forcing us to meet remotely, which means we’re prioritizing key historical objects for digitization and virtual presentation. The beauty of this pivot is that everyone benefits – even those who aren’t master’s students – because the Online Archive is open to all. As a taste, here are a few recent additions to the site that represent typographic milestones over the first 150 years of letterpress printing.
We miss sharing unexpected gems with you in person at the Archive. In this new series we’ll share them from afar.
A few staff favorites in the reading room at the original Letterform Archive location. The first two books here are from The Complete Commercial Artist, covered in detail in another post.
A while back, the design publication It’s Nice That invited us to share some of our favorite books for their “Bookshelf” series. It was a nice way to introduce an international audience to a few of the unusual and delightful objects we regularly show in our on-site tours. As we continue to be closed to visitors during the pandemic it’s a good time to reprise that piece, along with more images of the books, and a new selection from Florence Fu, which is not a book at all.
Librarian Kate Long recounts the many ways we use the Emigre collection, and Jon Sueda introduces a new series for experiencing Emigre magazine in the Online Archive.
It takes a long time to do most things well. When I started volunteering at Letterform Archive, the organization had just received its first major donation. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre had gifted their archives containing thousands of objects: books they printed, books they referenced, type development files, type specimens, every issue of Emigre magazine, process work and proofs, and binders holding a few decades’ worth of communication.
We love to set tables for guests. Now, we’re inviting them to set their own. Custom collections by Levit, Levée, Morla, Sandhaus, and Weefur weave unique threads of design history, style, and meaning.
Last fall, when we introduced Tables, a tool for creating sets of typographic artifacts from our Online Archive, we asked a few friends, board members, and staff to put the tool to use. The results demonstrate the myriad ways members can use Tables to build collections of inspiration, research, and resources for use in the studio or classroom.
60 virtual backgrounds bring you into the Archive for your next video conference call.
Letterform Archive staff with our custom virtual backgrounds.
Like many of you sheltering at home, our team is seeing a lot of each other within the now-familiar grid of video chat rectangles. We love getting a peek at everyone’s home office, but we also miss being surrounded by the Archive and its countless bits of inspiration and delight.
So, as an addition to our Cabin F(or)ever kit, we’re pleased to bring you our first batch of background images selected from objects in the Online Archive, each carefully cropped and edited for Zoom. Now you can use our periodical wall to visualize your ideal home library, wallpaper your room with Paul Rand, furnish your apartment with type from Caslon’s 1844 specimen, live inside an issue of Emigre, or do “some blue sky thinking” with Martin Venezky.
Revisit nine presentations that explore the power of typography beyond the Archive, from pioneering film and digital graphics to saving endangered scripts.
The Letterform Lecture series complements Type West, our postgraduate certificate program in type design. In normal times we gather at the San Francisco Public Library where the talks are free and open to the public, but the series went online this spring in response to the pandemic. While we miss seeing you in person, the new format gives us a chance to reach our global audience in real time. Thanks to support from Adobe Fonts, recordings of these lectures are available to all within a few days after the event. As 2020 comes to a close we found it a good time to remember all the excellent talks from the year and give you quick access to those you missed.
Despite pandemic restrictions, the Archive’s Collections Team is actively (and safely) making our new space feel like home.
The calm before the storm. A look at the new vault and staff workspace soon after the buildout was finally complete and before the big move began.
As you may have heard, we moved to a new space in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood in September. Like a lot of things this year, it didn't come easy, but it feels like a fresh start. At our original location in Potrero Hill, we were just plain out of room — for desks, for books, for collections care projects. Despite turning every corner and closet available into bookcases, our shelves were overflowing. We had to keep incoming collections in boxes after processing them, because we didn't have a linear inch to spare.
As the second industrial revolution hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, leaps in electrification, manufacturing, and transportation led to rapid changes in Western economies and societies. Advancements in paper making, printing, and typographic technologies followed suit, resulting in cheaper and more plentiful books, new forms of advertising to meet the demands of expanding commerce, and a burst of color and special effects that were previously impossible or too costly to produce. Meanwhile, as populations became vastly more urbanized, artists and printers waxed poetic about country life, incorporating the natural world into their work.
The latest batch of items in the Online Archive represents several dozen highlights from this era in our collection, including work by Will Bradley and Alphonse Mucha, sign painter portfolios from France, early type foundry ephemera, and a remarkable English catalog of wood type.
Letterform Archive will benefit from the fresh perspective and expertise of two creative innovators as we expand the board.
We are pleased and honored to welcome two new members to our Board of Directors. A familiar face to anyone who has seen our membership video, Leila Weefur was a visiting researcher in our early years, and their story about exploring Blackness in advertising and typography at the Archive can be seen in The Occasional. Alejandro Chavetta has partnered with us on many projects, including exhibitions at Astro Studios where he was creative director, and content-creation for Adobe’s Create platform (now Discover), where he serves as Editor in Chief. Leila and Alejandro join an expanding board which aims to represent and respond to our broad community.
Florence Fu talks with Choi Sung Min about the history of Korean visual culture and our new collection of books, posters, and ephemera from over 25 studios.
Among the 25 objects just added to the Online Archive are works representing various writing systems beyond Latin. The items are highlights from two events this spring: a master’s seminar in type history that we taught for California College of Arts, and a lecture, “A Brief Typographic Trip Around the World”, hosted by the Center for Book Arts in New York. In a time when a pandemic has hampered most of our summer travel, let our lifelike images take you on a virtual vacation to 18th-century Indonesia, 1920s Tokyo, or India through the ages.
