News / Collections

In 1952, the competing Swiss trade journals Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen and Revue suisse de l’imprimerie merged with Typografische Monatsblätter (TM), a monthly periodical advertised as the leading publication of the Swiss graphic design industry. Tailored to a diverse audience of design professionals, the magazine published articles in German, French, and English under the editorial direction of Rudolf Hostettler (1919–81), with Robert Büchler (1914–2005) overseeing its initial art direction. Unlike many contemporary trade publications that focus primarily on showcasing finished work, TM combined writing on professional practice with long-form essays devoted to design theory and criticism. From the early ’50s through the ’60s, both the journal’s editorial content and visual approach were strongly influenced by contributing editor Emil Ruder (1914–70), whose tenure at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel helped to establish the foundational principles of Swiss Style.

Letterform Archive is a living archive, a perpetual project to not only preserve historic design, but also inspire new work. To mark our 10th anniversary we teamed up with COLLINS to create 100 Tens: 50 interpretations of the number 1 from the Archive’s collection, paired with 50 contributions from some of the most innovative designers working today.

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.