Author: Letterform Archive

The brilliant Dutch modernist Piet Zwart (1885–1977) described himself as a “typotekt”. The term captured his multidisciplinary approach, creating a legacy that bridged architecture, industrial design, interior design, graphic design, typography, and photography.

As Type West’s class of 2025 rolls into its final term, we’re marking a major milestone: after this year, more than 200 students (including Type@Cooper West classes of 2017 and 2018) residing in 22 countries will have graduated from the yearlong certificate program.

Letterform Archive’s reading room now serves as a display case for small, short-run exhibitions. Our third show, Localization: 15 Years of LetterSeed, opened this week and runs through the fall. It explores the rich typographic landscape of Korean typography and specifically Hangul, the unique writing system of the Korean language, through the lens of a single publication, LetterSeed, which has been published by the Korean Typographic Society since 2010.

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.

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.

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.

Through the use of bold language, graphic typography, and colorful layers, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s prints embody an intensity that catches the eye and provokes the mind. He is extremely outspoken about the impact of white supremacy and racism. These themes are reflected in Kennedy’s work and encompass the evolving trajectory of Black liberation in the United States. From growing up in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Era, to the rise of Black Nationalism in the 1970s, to the present Post-Civil Rights era, Kennedy has seen how these movements shaped Black identity in the United States and has drawn from this as inspiration.

Like nearly every professional field, women have been systematically omitted from graphic design history. Fortunately, many recent efforts, such as Alphabettes, Hall of Femmes, and the People’s Graphic Design Archive are pushing to rectify the situation. We’re doing our part by collecting and sharing the work of women, both past and living. Here are some highlights.