News / Collections

In our ongoing effort to expand the story of graphic design beyond the Western canon, Letterform Archive continues to collect objects that illustrate the development of the world’s writing systems. This means consulting with experts in those scripts, as we recently did with Synoptic Office, a design firm working internationally with a focus on cultural heritage and archival collections. Their research into the landscape of Chinese typography appears in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography. We asked their team to source Chinese lettering manuals that are otherwise inaccessible in the West. The resulting collection, gathered from bookshops and flea markets in China, is unusual for an American institution — and one that we were unlikely to acquire any other way. In this guest post, Caspar Lam and YuJune Park of Synoptic Office tell us what they discovered.

Sylvie Vodáková occupies a distinctive, yet largely unheralded, place in Czech design. Over several decades, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing well into the 2000s, she developed a visual language marked by restraint, clarity, and a deeply human touch. Her long-running involvement with the Květy Poezie (“Flowers of Poetry”) series made her not just a designer of books, but a quiet custodian of Czech literary culture.

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.

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. 

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.