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Many of the world’s languages are under-supported by digital typography. A crucial step toward change is inclusive type design education that meets the next generation of font makers where they are.

Letterform Archive is thrilled to announce its participation in the Knuth-Bigelow Type Design Incubator (KBI), a new educational partnership with SILICON, Stanford University’s initiative to advance digital inclusion and protect lower-resourced languages from extinction. Stanford Professor Thomas Mullaney, co-director of SILICON, is the driving force behind this effort to support digitally-disadvantaged languages. The inaugural five-week course was developed jointly by Lisa Huang from Words of Type, and Grendl Löfkvist and Angela Riechers from the Archive.

With cutting-edge fonts based on the bitmap as well as digital revivals that transcended the screen, Emigre Fonts pioneered type design in the early days of the pixel. But it was their formidable commitment to print that documented—and helped affirm—their contributions to twentieth-century visual culture. 

Since opening in 2015, Letterform Archive has grown from a 15,000-item private collection, to a publicly accessible resource of over 100,000 objects. The works of lettering, typography, and graphic design span movements and continents, but what ties everything together is text, the essential material of culture. This common thread lets anyone—from type nerds to poets, coders to cooks—have an entry point into the collection. Our dedication to radical access has made the Archive a thriving community hub, welcoming thousands of visitors from more than 40 countries, and offering an unparalleled opportunity to engage directly with masterpieces of design.

When Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko donated the Emigre papers to Letterform Archive not long after we opened our doors in 2015, we were spoiled for all collections to follow.

It wasn’t just that their archive was rich with material that defined an important era in design—one in which the new digital tools of the 1980s and ’90s created a surge in independent publishing and type design, with VanderLans and Licko’s innovative Emigre magazine and digital foundry at the forefront.

The big wall in Letterform Archive’s reading room now serves as a display case for small, short-run exhibitions. Our first pop-up opened in January to celebrate Lunar New Year. Curated by members of the Archive exhibition team, Jen Dao (姚逸雯) and Sherry Chou (徐雪俐), Good Luck explores the rich cultural heritage and modern interpretations of the holiday through a blend of custom red envelopes, holiday ephemera, and celebration event posters.

Among the contemporary pieces in Good Luck are four large screen prints featuring complex, stylized animals intertwined with letterforms. The posters come from the hive mind of Omnivore, a graphic design studio formed by “second-generation Asian-Americans, working mothers, design educators, small business owners, food lovers, justice seekers, and friends.” Alice Chung (Brooklyn), Karen Hsu (Portland, Oregon); and Julie Cho (Los Angeles) have been collaborating since 2002 and often think of themselves as a three-headed monster. Their firm is M/WBE (Minority- & Woman-owned) certified.

From Rarified to Commonplace:  A Brief History of Hashibukuro

The chopstick sleeve originated in the Imperial Court of Japan sometime during the Heian period (8th–12th century). Ladies-in-waiting are thought to have wrapped chopsticks in scraps of silk or other fine fabrics as it was considered impolite to pass unwrapped objects from one hand to another. Hundreds of years later, hashibukuro (“chopstick envelopes”) graced the banquet tables of shoguns, and by the Edo period (17th–19th century), establishments in the Yoshiwara red light district furnished hashibukuro to their regulars. 

We presented two dozen lectures and salons in 2024, both online and onsite at the Archive. Unless you’re our biggest fans (thank you!), you likely didn’t get to catch them all. So, here are a few videos that are worth some of your holiday downtime, from insightful looks at design history to new approaches that will exercise your typographic eye.