What happens after graduating from Letterform Archive’s type design program? Eight grads talk about how they’ve used their newfound skills.
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.
Our new pop-up exhibition celebrates LetterSeed, the seminal journal of Korean typography. Curators Chris Hamamoto, Su Hyun Leem, and Jeewoon Jung tell us how it reinvigorated the Hangul script.
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.
From centuries-old writing manuals to our new notecard set, flourishing shows the playful side of early modern Europe’s masters of the pen.
We connect with the duo responsible for Emigre Fonts, whose specimens are reproduced in the latest title from Letterform Archive Books.
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.
With 40 complete type specimens packed into 5 pounds, this compendium documents the output of one of the earliest (and most prolific) digital type foundries. Here’s a peek at the book’s foreword.
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.
Three volumes of rare specimen facsimiles lift the curtain on twentieth-century type, gathering essential documents of trendsetting faces as they were first meant to be seen.
Our new exhibition space not only brought us Good Luck, but also a fantastic set of zodiac posters by a three-headed monster.
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.
Designer and educator Angie Wang deciphers a collection of over 500 sleeves recently donated to the Archive.
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.