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यह लेटरफॉर्म आर्काइव पर प्रकाशित होने वाला पहला हिंदी लेख है। इसमें दुनिया भर से आई वस्तुएँ शामिल हैं, और यह लेख उनके कुछ चुने हुए उदाहरण प्रस्तुत करता है। इसे लिखने का उद्देश्य सिर्फ़ नए पाठकों तक पहुँचना नहीं है, बल्कि रॉडिकल एक्सेस के विचार को आगे बढ़ाना है, जिस पर लेटरफॉर्म आर्काइव की नींव रखी गई है।

Letterform Archive is honored to welcome author, artist, educator, designer, and podcast pioneer Debbie Millman as a guest curator for our latest reading room exhibition. Tristram Shandy, The First Modern Book showcases a book that, in many ways, feels astonishingly modern—even though it was first published 266 years ago in 1760.

In 1972, the editorial board of Typografische Monatsblätter (TM), one of the leading trade journals in Switzerland, approved a series of cover designs intended to lay the groundwork for the publication’s new artistic direction. Enlisting newly appointed board member Wolfgang Weingart (1941–2021) to produce fifteen covers for the 1972 and ’73 print runs, the outcome inspired both high praise and harsh criticism from a design milieu accustomed to the quiet precision of former art director Robert Büchler (1914–2005) and regular contributor Emil Ruder (1914–1970). Weingart’s provocative covers invited an unprecedented level of controversy by appearing to flout the fundamental principles of modernist design. Instead, his iconoclastic approach struck at the very heart of the Swiss tradition.

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.