Events
Letterform Archive Tour for Neon Speaks
with Stephen Coles
A hands-on tour of sign and lettering artifacts curated for the annual San Francisco neon festival.
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Letterform Archive is a nonprofit museum and library preserving and sharing over 100,000 items of graphic design history. In this special guided tour for the Neon Speaks Festival with Archive associate curator, Stephen Coles, you’ll get hands-on access to original works and books on signs and lettering from this one-of-a-kind collection. See oversized movie theater banners, original artwork from the Speedball archive, an early-20th-century portfolio of neon photography, rare manuals on sign making, and other artifacts, including a major archive of original artwork by Wonderlite, a San Francisco neon sign company active in the 1920s–60s.
Choose between two tour sessions: 10:00am and 11:30am.
Stephen Coles
Stephen “Stewf” Coles, Associate Curator & Editorial Director (he/him), joined the staff after serving on our Board of Directors since its inception. Since the early 2000s he has been active in the type community, initially as a creative director at FontShop, and later as an independent consultant, connecting font makers with font users. Stephen wrote the book The Anatomy of Type and co-founded the influential websites Typographica and Fonts In Use. With his background in design and journalism, combined with an obsession for type history, Stephen is responsible for the online face and voice of the Archive, and shares the collection through the blog and other editorial projects. As a member of the curatorial team, he helps to shape the future of the collection.
