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News / Online Archive

Calendar Design in the Online Archive

A variety of planners, event guides, and type specimens offer over a dozen ways to represent the year through lettering and typography.

We’re starting 2024 with a selection of objects in the Online Archive that chart Gregorian timekeeping across the twentieth century. This compilation includes traditional calendars, fonts crafted explicitly for typesetting calendars, branded promotional calendars, and material that reveals the process of making a very unusual calendar. We hope these ideas inspire you throughout the year.

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Now Online: Artists’ Books, Broadsides, Calligraphy, Ephemera, and Type Specimens

We just added over 500 objects and nearly 6,000 images to our Online Archive, the largest expansion since the site launched.

Collections Assistant Eve Scarborough and Digitization Librarian April Harper prepare a book for photography.

Letterform Archive strives for radical access to our collection of lettering, typography, and graphic design. That ethos demands that we digitally preserve as much material as we can and make it available to our international community. To that end, we’re continually expanding the Online Archive, a free repository of visual inspiration. The latest batch of additions is the largest since the site launched, and includes work by Jack Stauffacher, Amos Kennedy Jr., Camp Books, Hunter Saxony III, hundreds of typeface specimens, the first taste of the Sheaff Ephemera Collection, and much more.

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Type History Toolkit, Part 3: Non-Linear Lenses

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.

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Type History Toolkit, Part 2: De-Centering the Latin Letter in Design Education

Sabiha Basrai recommends globally expansive approaches to studying typography.

Letterform Archive is steadily expanding the representation of Eastern writing systems in the Online Archive. The image above highlights a few selections. See also the Global Scripts table, a guided view of these collections for use in education.
Type History Toolkit

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. 

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Type History Toolkit, Part 1: A Chronological Approach

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!

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New in the Online Archive: Share Your Own Tables

The long-awaited feature empowers Archive members to share custom sets of graphic design artifacts with anyone.

Online Archive table sharing screenshot

Letterform Archive members have long been able to save sets of images in the Online Archive as Tables. With our latest update, all members can now share Tables! Teachers can share sets of design artifacts with their class, or designers can share a mood board with their team or clients. We can’t wait to see how you use Tables now that you can make them available to anyone.

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Letterform Archive Featured in New Book: Collecting Graphic Design

The Optik Books title highlights 10 collections around the world which specialize in a discipline that is traditionally overlooked by art and design institutions.

Letterform Archive in Collecting Graphic Design

Archives are more than just warehouses; they are greenhouses for the nurturing of narratives. Out of archival seeds, mighty stories grow. — Steven Heller on Collecting Graphic Design

A5/10: Collecting Graphic Design — The Archiving of the Visual
A5/10: Collecting Graphic Design — The Archiving of the Visual, Optik Books, 2021

Based in Düsseldorf, Jens Müller has authored, edited, and published dozens of books on design. The A5 series — under his own Optik Books imprint — offers affordable and beautifully documented snapshots of design history at a digestible length and (you guessed it) A5 size. The 10th volume in this series, Collecting Graphic Design, calls attention to the few institutions and private collectors who concentrate on preserving and sharing objects of graphic design, such as posters, logos, book covers, design manuals, and ephemera.

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Now Online: Landmarks of Early Western Typography

From Gutenberg to Granjon, new additions to the Online Archive represent major developments in letterpress printing.

Christophe Plantin, Senatus Populique Genvensis…, 1579

In her recent update, librarian Kate Long mentioned the ways we use the Archive as a teaching tool, especially in our Survey of Type History for the MFA Design program at the California College of the Arts. Now in its third year, the course tells the story of design firsthand through a curated selection of artifacts from our collection. This year, of course, the pandemic is forcing us to meet remotely, which means we’re prioritizing key historical objects for digitization and virtual presentation. The beauty of this pivot is that everyone benefits – even those who aren’t master’s students – because the Online Archive is open to all. As a taste, here are a few recent additions to the site that represent typographic milestones over the first 150 years of letterpress printing.

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