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Joshua Darden, born 1979 in Los Angeles, California, published his first typeface in 1995 at the age of 15, becoming the first known African-American typeface designer. For the next ten years he honed his skills as an independent type foundry, and then as a staff designer at the renowned Hoefler Type Foundry under the direction of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. He struck out on his own again in 2005, opening a new foundry, Darden Studio, and releasing his most ambitious and recognized design, Freight.

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.

Letterform Archive has a long and close relationship with the work of Jack Stauffacher. We hold a significant run of his Greenwood Press books; we published a book on his wood type prints; and we are the home of his studio archive. This last collection — rich in private experiments — sparked the idea for an exhibition of the artist’s work that has yet to be shown in public. Curated by Rob Saunders, the show explores Stauffacher’s playful and improvisational typography and features more than 100 prints, sketches, iterative proofs, and other explorations of his creative process.

As we embark on a new year of Type West, our certificate program in type design, we’d like to share some major milestones.

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.

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.

Produced between 1958 and 1971, the Schriftenkartei (Typeface Index) represents a West German agency’s effort to catalog all the country’s typefaces in production at the time. The cards are useful for type researchers and designers as they share a common format and show complete character sets — a resource not often included in foundry specimens. Thanks to a generous donation, a set of these cards is now in Letterform Archive’s collection, and scans are available online.