Letterform Archive

10 stories

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.

September 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…

September 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.

August 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!

June 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.

May 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.

May 12

Letterform ArchiveBlack Memory Scholar: The Language of Storytellers Our next pop-up exhibition is on view in the Reading Room gallery from April 28 to July 10, 2026. Jada Simone Haynes describes the very personal process of curating the show.

April 27

Letterform Archiveसंग्रह से : हिन्दी में लेटरफॉर्म आर्काइव का परिचय अक्षरों के इतिहास और डिज़ाइन की कहानियाँ, अब हिन्दी में। / An introduction in Hindi to Letterform Archive’s collection.

April 22

Letterform ArchiveLetterform Archive Pop-Up Exhibition Curated by Debbie Millman Celebrates a Groundbreaking Book Design Tristram Shandy, The First Modern Book is on view in the our Reading Room gallery until April 26, 2026.

April 14

Letterform ArchiveFrom the Collection: Legacies of Swiss Style, Part 2—Wolfgang Weingart We return to Switzerland to consider the impact of the provocative designer who pushed modern typography to its limits.

April 13

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