Periodicals as Collections, No. 1: Het Overzicht and Wendingen
A magazine is a microcosm of collecting and curating. Our new series explores the connections within and between our collection of avant-garde periodicals.
News
Designing the Online Archive
We’re building a virtual discovery machine for letter lovers. Meet the designers who put you in the driver’s seat.
The Online Archive beta is running and members are taking it for a test drive. Meanwhile, we’re taking a peek under the hood and introducing you to the people who built it.
The Online Archive: Describing Design
Established library vocabularies aren’t right for our unique collection of type, lettering, and graphic design. So we’re creating a new one.
Now Live: The Online Archive Beta
Experience Letterform Archive from anywhere in the world.
When guests visit the Archive our goal is to inspire them through radical access to our collection of graphic design and typography artifacts. The aim is to encourage discovery through visual exploration. Now we’re making that experience available to everyone everywhere with the new Online Archive. Charter members will receive exclusive access to the beta before we officially go live in 2020.
Letterform Archive Belongs to You: Become a Member Today
You are the heart of Letterform Archive.
Whether you follow us on Instagram, volunteer every week in the stacks, joined us for a tour or research visit, donated $10 or donated your own work — you make the Archive possible.
Susan Kare and Louise Sandhaus Join Our Board of Directors
We welcome two design icons with the experience and vision to help shape Letterform Archive’s future.
We are pleased and humbled to announce two new members of our Board of Directors. Beyond their impactful professional resumes, Susan Kare and Louise Sandhaus exemplify the range of background and engagement with the design community that will help guide the Archive in our pivotal early years.
This Just In: Tézzo Suzuki, Calendar 19
From Tokyo, an annual carnival of numerals in every form imaginable — and many forms never before imagined.
Every year, since 2012, Tézzo Suzuki makes a calendar. It’s a personal project, an opportunity to work without clients. It’s also a chance to “pursue new graphical vocabulary”. With each year he dreams up new ways to render numbers one through 31, each limited only by color (one) and canvas (square). Suzuki graciously donated the 2018 and 2019 editions of the calendar to the Archive, and Calendar 19 just arrived.
This Just In: Mark Fox and Angie Wang
The San Francisco duo demonstrate the impact of the designer’s voice in politics and graphic design.
Mark Fox and Angie Wang do not shy away from deploying design as critique. Together they are Design is Play, a studio practice formed in 2008 recognized for award-winning branding and identity work in addition to political graphics. They are educators of design and typography at California College of the Arts, as well as advocates of issues they care about. Fox and Wang’s collection at the Archive is worthy of attention — for both its aesthetic merit and its cultural relevance in our current political moment. Many have debated the designer’s role in politics, and Fox and Wang set an example of how design can pull back the curtain to describe how the world is, or even imagine how it could be.