Letterform Archive

10 stories

Letterform ArchiveIn Conversation with the Authors of Super-Veloz With the launch of a new book preview site , we asked Alex Trochut and Andreu Balius for a crash course on the modular type marvel from Spain.

10.27

Letterform ArchiveAn Undercover Look at Letterform Archive’s Graffiti Collection For the past five years, our library of graffiti zines has provided a rare snapshot of an underrepresented art form and the dynamic community that sustains it.

10.19

Letterform ArchiveInside Boutiques Magnifiques Our new suite of postcards combines old-world Parisian charm with modern flourishes from illustrator and lettering artist Laura Serra.

10.06

Letterform ArchiveType for All! Ten Years of Type West The Archive’s type design certificate program celebrates its tenth year! Over 260 examples of student work will be on display in our main gallery from September 26 to November 15, 2026.

10.02

Letterform ArchiveMartin Venezky: Process Work Our next pop-up exhibition is on view in the Reading Room gallery from September 26 to November 8, 2026. Jon Sueda speaks to Martin Venezky about the body of work that inspired it.

09.22

Letterform ArchiveInside Creative Papers From the golden age of letterpress to the birth of digital type, our new series of gift-wrap and craft-paper books transform beloved objects from our collection for use in wrapping, crafting…

09.21

Letterform ArchiveFrom the Collection: Dorothy and Otis Shepard Known for their decades-long partnership with the Wrigley Company, this creative couple helped introduce modernist design to everyday life in midcentury America.

08.10

Letterform ArchiveSeen Together: Ludwig & Mayer Type Specimen and Poster Design for Chlorodont What connects a 1930s type specimen to a student’s assignment from the 1950s? A century-old oral hygiene brand from Germany!

06.22

Letterform ArchiveFrom the Collection: Emigre Font Development Files Drawing from her experience working with the collection, and conversations with its principle designers, Digitization Specialist Eve Scarborough reflects on the materiality of type design.

05.26

Letterform ArchiveThe Small Foundry Fund for Type West at Letterform Archive Introducing a new community-driven funding initiative devoted to expanding access to our Type West program.

05.12

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo