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.
We’re partnering with Stanford to keep languages alive through type design education.
Many of the world’s languages are under-supported by digital typography. A crucial step toward change is inclusive type design education that meets the next generation of font makers where they are.
Letterform Archive is thrilled to announce its participation in the Knuth-Bigelow Type Design Incubator (KBI), a new educational partnership with SILICON, Stanford University’s initiative to advance digital inclusion and protect lower-resourced languages from extinction. Stanford Professor Thomas Mullaney, co-director of SILICON, is the driving force behind this effort to support digitally-disadvantaged languages. The inaugural five-week course was developed jointly by Lisa Huang from Words of Type, and Grendl Löfkvist and Angela Riechers from the Archive.
This year, Letterform Archive hosted 24 presentations on typography and graphic design. You can still watch them all.
We presented two dozen lectures and salons in 2024, both online and onsite at the Archive. Unless you’re our biggest fans (thank you!), you likely didn’t get to catch them all. So, here are a few videos that are worth some of your holiday downtime, from insightful looks at design history to new approaches that will exercise your typographic eye.
We’re celebrating Type West alumni and 125+ original typefaces since Letterform Archive opened the first yearlong type design program on the West Coast.
As we embark on a new year of Type West, our certificate program in type design, we’d like to share some major milestones.
Our video collections let you catch up on every Letterform Lecture, and — for the first time — all Salon Series recordings back to 2019.
In 2023 Letterform Archive hosted dozens of online and onsite events exploring typographic history and contemporary design, and covering a wide range of writing systems and locales, from Arabic to Cherokee, Buenos Aires to Vienna.
The last installment of our design education toolkit offers alternative ways to teach and learn typography using themed tables in the Online Archive.
The Archive’s wide-ranging collection allows many entry points into type history. In earlier posts we offered a conventional chronological approach, and a global perspective. Over the years the Archive team built out a wide variety of tables in the Online Archive based on their interests or responding to a tour’s requirements. Many of these explore typographically significant themes, movements, and subcultures in graphic design, offering alternative ways to teach and learn about letterforms.
Sabiha Basrai recommends globally expansive approaches to studying typography.
This article by activist and educator Sabiha Basrai is the result of her 2023 research fellowship at Letterform Archive where she studied collections of global scripts and collaborated with staff on curriculum development.
Curated sets of objects in the Online Archive tell a visual story of typographic design, starting with the Western world.
We love to hear how the Online Archive is enhancing design courses around the world. Teachers are using the Tables feature to create and share design artifacts and inspiration with their students, or present curated sets as slideshows in class. During the pandemic, when we weren’t able to welcome students to the Archive, the staff created our own tables* to help navigate type history and highlight works in the collection that exemplify major movements. Now we’re sharing a few of these tables with you!