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Author: Tanya George

For Your Reference: Books About Signs

From retail branding to wayfinding, sign letters shape our urban landscape. Get a peek at the Archive’s stacks in this first stop on our reference library tour.

As an omnipresent artifact of design, signs have a universal ability to both impart information and evoke a feeling. Sign documentation — whether online or in a book — can be a portal into a place’s cultural history. It captures a typographic snapshot of a city. It tells a story about evolving reproduction technologies and how they affect design choices, how commercial dynamics affect cityscapes, and how typography can communicate the intangibles of a business and its clientele.

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2022 Design Lectures: Ten Videos to Revisit at the New Year

Last year Letterform Archive hosted 24 virtual events exploring typography from around the world. You can still watch them all.

2022 was another busy year for online public programming at the Archive. Over the year we recorded two dozen visually rich presentations on typography, graphic design, and their connection with our culture at large. These events include Letterform Lectures, a companion to the Type West certificate program in type design; our Salon Series, featuring staff or guest experts taking a deep dive into a specific theme within the Archive; and a special event with Ellen Lupton celebrating the culmination of the Bauhaus Typography at 100 exhibition.

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This Just In: Indian Movie Posters

From Bollywood to Tollywood, Tanya George looks at her country’s varied cinematic industries and writing systems through our new collection of film posters.

A few of the 15 posters included in the Archive’s new Indian movie poster collection.

For several years now, Letterform Archive’s curatorial team has focused on expanding its collection to underrepresented parts of the world. One ongoing project under this umbrella includes promotion material from India’s diverse film industries as a way to showcase expressive lettering in multiple scripts, including Bengali, Devanagari, Urdu, and Telugu. In 2021, I was invited to help shortlist from a wider set of posters, designs that represent a wide range of lettering styles.

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How Type Travelled Across Nations and Foundries

Our correspondent Tanya George dives into the Archive’s type specimen collection to explore the many ways typeface designs changed hands in the metal era.

Catalogs from two different foundries reveal two very similar typefaces. Left: Alpha-Blox, ATF specimen, ca. 1950. Right: Positive, Gujarati Type Foundry specimen, ca. 1940s.

Archives can be intimidating spaces. They’re usually filled with objects and materials that are valuable and relevant to building knowledge but require someone to know what they’re looking for and ask the right questions to the right people. So here is a small gateway into the type specimen collection at Letterform Archive. I ask a question — “Why does the same typeface design reappear in specimens from other foundries?” — and try to answer it by using objects found at the Archive and other accessible resources.

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Beyond the Bauhaus: Ecuador, Land of the Shuar

Vanessa Zúñiga Tinizaray refocuses geometric and systematic design principles on a culture far from 20th-century Europe.

Vanessa Zúñiga Tinizaray
This article supplements a Bauhaus Typography at 100 interview with Vanessa Alexandra Zúñiga Tinizaray.
See the interview

Letterform Archive’s current exhibition celebrates, among many things, the centenary of the Bauhaus. Such recognition indicates the significant impact of the school in modern culture. The Bauhaus has become synonymous with minimal and geometric systems of design. This makes it convenient to attribute this school of thought as a source for any graphic work that shares these characteristics, but similar ideas have been around long before the Bauhaus. The Ecuador, the Land of the Shuar poster that is part of the “Beyond the Bauhaus” section of the show is an example of contemporary designers practicing some of the principles associated with the school, and, in this case, principles rooted in a marginalized history.

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Typefaces Inspired by the Bauhaus

From Futura to ITC Bauhaus, our survey of Bauhaus type continues with a look at typefaces that adopted the school’s simplified, geometric ideals.

László Moholy-Nagy, cover for Bauhaus Buildings Dessau (Bauhausbauten Dessau), 1930. This late Bauhaus Book may be the only official Bauhaus publication to use a typeface inspired by the school (Futura Black), though it was perhaps lettered by hand with the type as a model.
This article supplements Archive Salon Series 29: Bauhaus Typefaces. Members can access the recording.
Watch the Video

Our first installment of this two-part series showcased the various typefaces found in official publications and other objects by Bauhaus instructors and students. We learned that the type used at the school was primarily utilitarian, readily available to printers at the time. But what about the radical geometric letterforms we connect to Bauhaus principles? Let’s look at minimalist typefaces inspired by the school, many of which live on as commercial successes long after the institution was forced to close down.

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Typefaces Used by the Bauhaus

The school’s main typographic story is not about inventing radical typefaces, but using existing typefaces in a radical way.

Nameplate for bauhaus magazine, vol. 1, no. 1, 1926.

Letterform Archive’s inaugural exhibition, Bauhaus Typography at 100, displays nearly 200 objects representing the school’s influence on printed design. From its start in 1919, the Bauhaus incorporated mass production techniques in the creation of artworks across various programs offered on campus, from architecture and product design to textiles and graphics. While the school has come to be known for a simplified, geometric approach across all these disciplines, the exhibition narrates an evolution of letterform styles and illuminates the many people who developed what we now recognize as Bauhaus typography. As a companion to December’s Archive Salon, this two-part article series focuses on the core material that shaped Bauhaus typography: the typefaces.

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Type West 2021 Typefaces

A new website showcases the results of Letterform Archive’s yearlong program in type design.

The Class of 2021 was the first Type West cohort to meet entirely online. The program brought together a group of 19 students from across the globe who logged into sessions multiple times a week. It was not only a space for learning the tools and techniques necessary to make fonts, but an international gathering place of shared interests and goals.

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