During this 10-week online workshop, which meets Tuesday evenings from January 29-April 4, participants will create their own original typefaces as they gain an understanding of the methodologies and software used to produce high-quality digital type. The primary goal of this workshop is to show participants how to systematically think about type and successfully structure […]
New Ideas in Visual Language features new Letterform Archive acquisitions from Curatorial Fellow Vivian Sming. This pop-up exhibition presents books and prints that highlight unusual letterforms, modular typography, unique and collaborative reading experiences, and contemporary artists using language in their work.
This Letterform Lecture will take you on a whirlwind tour of bitmaps, cathode rays, and how type and computer technology have evolved together. This talk is part how-it-works and where-it-came-from, and part love letter to what is inevitably lost to obsolescence. While print has often been the ultimate goal of "digital" typography, there is a […]
Steve Heller cut his typographic and design teeth working on art staffs and art directing underground newspapers in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. His current memoir Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York (PAPress) tells the story of going from radical neophyte ad hoc designer to working on the most prestigious newspaper page […]
In this Letterform Lecture, we will taste the visual power of a lost calligraphic tradition through one artist’s immersion in the early Arabic scripts broadly labelled as “Kufic." Joumana Medlej uses examples from her work to illustrate the respective qualities of the two great strands of this family, and how she harnesses its visual language […]
Accounts of the origins of the alphabet contribute to the broad history of ideas. Many vivid intellectual traditions have flourished, and some have been set aside, discredited by “modern” scientific methods of archaeology and forensic science. Turning our attention to these varied lineages, we see not only a history of the alphabet, but also different […]