We’ve been regularly updating the Online Archive beta since we opened it to members in November. Here are the newest collections and features.

Our collection offers the opportunity to tell a thorough history of type. Last month we took that story on the road.

A magazine is a microcosm of collecting and curating. Our new series explores the connections within and between our collection of avant-garde periodicals.

We’re building a virtual discovery machine for letter lovers. Meet the designers who put you in the driver’s seat.

The Online Archive beta is running and members are taking it for a test drive. Meanwhile, we’re taking a peek under the hood and introducing you to the people who built it.

Established library vocabularies aren’t right for our unique collection of type, lettering, and graphic design. So we’re creating a new one.

Experience Letterform Archive from anywhere in the world.

When guests visit the Archive our goal is to inspire them through radical access to our collection of graphic design and typography artifacts. The aim is to encourage discovery through visual exploration. Now we’re making that experience available to everyone everywhere with the new Online Archive. Charter members will receive exclusive access to the beta before we officially go live in 2020.

You are the heart of Letterform Archive.

Whether you follow us on Instagram, volunteer every week in the stacks, joined us for a tour or research visit, donated $10 or donated your own work — you make the Archive possible.

We welcome two design icons with the experience and vision to help shape Letterform Archive’s future.

We are pleased and humbled to announce two new members of our Board of Directors. Beyond their impactful professional resumes, Susan Kare and Louise Sandhaus exemplify the range of background and engagement with the design community that will help guide the Archive in our pivotal early years.

From Tokyo, an annual carnival of numerals in every form imaginable — and many forms never before imagined.

Every year, since 2012, Tézzo Suzuki makes a calendar. It’s a personal project, an opportunity to work without clients. It’s also a chance to “pursue new graphical vocabulary”. With each year he dreams up new ways to render numbers one through 31, each limited only by color (one) and canvas (square). Suzuki graciously donated the 2018 and 2019 editions of the calendar to the Archive, and Calendar 19 just arrived.

The San Francisco duo demonstrate the impact of the designer’s voice in politics and graphic design.

Mark Fox and Angie Wang do not shy away from deploying design as critique. Together they are Design is Play, a studio practice formed in 2008 recognized for award-winning branding and identity work in addition to political graphics. They are educators of design and typography at California College of the Arts, as well as advocates of issues they care about. Fox and Wang’s collection at the Archive is worthy of attention — for both its aesthetic merit and its cultural relevance in our current political moment. Many have debated the designer’s role in politics, and Fox and Wang set an example of how design can pull back the curtain to describe how the world is, or even imagine how it could be.

Joyce Yin reflects on her time as our 2018 intern.

The San Francisco designer reminds us about the beauty of not knowing how things will turn out.

On paper, Martin Venezky is an artist, designer, photographer, and educator. He is also a collector, and some might even consider him a sort of curator. He often plays these roles all at the same time, whether he’s working on a project or not. In both his life and in his practice, he tells stories by combining and recontextualizing images and objects found in the world to create new worlds. His process reveals a lot about his own story too — one of imperfection, surprise, and patience.

“To design a poster and do the whole thing digitally? That gets boring. You’re just sitting there hitting keys, but you kinda wanna get in and see the scale of it.”

A large collection of objects by an under-appreciated Dutch modernist demonstrates the branding power of lettering and color.

Our holdings of packaging design recently got a significant boost with the addition of several hundred objects created by Jacob (commonly signed “Jac.”) Jongert in the 1920s and ’30s for Van Nelle, a Rotterdam-based manufacturer of coffee, tea, and tobacco. The extensive and varied collection includes labels, boxes, tins, in-store displays, posters, advertising, and other collateral, like pocket notebooks and calendars.

From ancient practice to contemporary children’s books, the endeavor to form text into image is found throughout the Archive.

The Author of Morla : Design treats us to her best-loved inspiration sources — and shares how far-ranging influences make it into her work.

The award-winning author of Morla : Design shares her secrets for choosing the right typeface for the job.

Prototyping the covers for Morla : Design.

The AIGA Medalist, AGI Member, and National Design Award Recipient to donate her archive.

We’re honored to share the wit and wisdom of the humble but powerful provocateur. Dozens of his prints are now at the Archive.

If the “Father of Semantography” had his way with written language, we’d all be #blissed.

We’re thrilled to announce our new postgraduate certificate in typeface design.

Sketches, comps, and cut paper tell the visual tale of a master designer at work.

Carlos Rodriguez reflects on his time as our winter intern.

We commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Paris uprising with a collection of posters by the Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop).

Among our holdings of contemporary calligraphy are three artists who break boundaries between visual art and the written word.