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Author: Stephen Coles

Bauhaus Typography at 100 Opens Nov. 13, 2021

The wait is over. Letterform Archive welcomes you to our new home to experience the inaugural exhibition of our first-ever gallery.

Bauhaus Typography at 100 banner

We’re thrilled to announce the opening of our first gallery with an exhibition of more than 150 pieces from our permanent collection.

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Now Online: Landmarks of Early Western Typography

From Gutenberg to Granjon, new additions to the Online Archive represent major developments in letterpress printing.

Christophe Plantin, Senatus Populique Genvensis…, 1579

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.

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Now Online: Guest-Curated Tables

We love to set tables for guests. Now we invited them to set their own. Custom collections by Levit, Levée, Morla, Sandhaus, and Weefur weave threads of design history, style, and meaning.

A sampling of artifacts from the guest tables featured in this article.

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.

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A Year of Letterform Lectures

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.

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A Librarian’s Update on Our New Home

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.

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Now Online: Color, Ornament, and Type at the Turn of the 20th Century

New additions to the Online Archive let you reach back to a vibrant period of ornamentation and letterform expression.

Ramade, plate from portfolio
Louis Ramade, D’Enseignes Décoratives á l’Usage des Peintres, chromolithographic print, France, 1890.

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.

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