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.
We just added over 500 objects and nearly 6,000 images to our Online Archive, the largest expansion since the site launched.
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.
From calligraphy, to concrete poetry, to digital type, Raghunath Krishna Joshi’s influence on Indian letters is boundless. Meet the man who used writing to unite the subcontinent.
This treasure chest of 600+ specimen cards holds a complete snapshot of the last metal type foundries in Germany.
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.
The Occasional is an irregular printed update from an unusual institution. Get your free copy now.
We just approved printer’s proofs for the second issue of The Occasional. Didn’t get the first edition in 2019? Consider it an annual report, only much less annual, and much more interesting.
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.
Our latest book opens the vault on Vienna 1900, sharing a graphic design showpiece of the Secession’s leading artist-designers and their students.
