Inside Letterform Archive with Rob Saunders

Designer, publisher, and curator Rob Saunders founded San Francisco’s Letterform Archive with typography, calligraphy, lettering, and graphic design that he’d collected over 40 years. Opened to visitors in February 2015 with 15,000 artifacts, it had already doubled by August with the addition of Dutch publisher Jan Tholenaar’s typeface specimens collection. The next year, it swelled again with work from experimental digital design magazine and foundry Emigré and Speedball pen inventor Ross F. George. Since then, many donors have turned to Letterform Archive because it promises to make these riches widely accessible to the public. As curator, Saunders is filling gaps in the design canon while expanding the canon, seeking underrepresented visual culture across the globe. Today, the archive represents thousands of years of history in more than 100,000 objects, from books and posters to sketches and ephemera, as well as a well-stocked reference library.

Bringing analog genius to a generation of digital natives, Letterform Archive has taken a multipronged approach to sharing the collection in person, but also online, where a radical ability to zoom in and pan “is a superpower for educators,” Saunders says. Beyond the choreography of hands-on public tours and scholarly visits, high-fidelity digitization (think: full-object staging, super-high-resolution files) means documents can be viewed in such detail that the eye can feel texture when the hand cannot. It makes much of what Saunders’s team does possible⁠—book publishing, research, teaching, exhibiting⁠—both locally and virtually. In 11 years, the archive has welcomed more than 28,000 guests from 30 countries and graduated more than 200 Type West students, who have each designed an original typeface family in the process.

The Eames Institute spoke with Saunders about how⁠—along with superb reproduction quality⁠—tactility, humility, and serendipity have contributed to the archive’s growing influence.

Eames Institute: You discovered calligraphy at 16. When and why did you begin collecting?

Rob Saunders: I collected in college, but the way most design students collect, which is the texts that you have to have, books about your heroes and books about movements or genres that interest you. Later, after college, I got into the publishing business and began collecting more seriously. But fundamentally, it was always a collection gathered by a designer for inspiration, so it was very idiosyncratic.

EI: At first, the “Archive” consisted of small gatherings of creative people at your home. I think you only started to formalize it after realizing that young designers were not seeing much of this work anywhere else?

RS: They weren’t seeing it at all. Their alternative, while they were trying to learn about design, was just Google and the internet, a pretty weak source of inspiration for graphic designers at the time. You’d see the same stuff on Google, on Pinterest, but it’s how most young designers were brought up. They’re born digital. They didn’t learn to do anything analog. And so their inspiration is all online and what’s really surprising is how these people are so thirsty for analog reality.

EI: How did you get the Emigré archive only 18 months after opening?

RS: They chose us because we promised to make the material more accessible. They just thought it would be used more and that was the value proposition. So now we’re kind of a magnet and we’re mediating a flow. We’ve grown to over 100,000 objects, which sounds like a lot, but we’re very picky. We’re being offered great stuff and we’re choosing the really great stuff. And we’ve also just become a good home.

EI: So how did opening Letterform Archive change how you approached the collecting?

RS: It made my responsibility as curator⁠—to craft something that could be meaningful in 100 years⁠—a very serious responsibility. Opening, we discovered our followers were all over the world: less than 20% Northern California, 50% the rest of the US, and 30% the rest of the world. They were interested in not just the Roman alphabet, not just Western design. They’re eclectic and geographically distributed across the world’s scripts, languages, and cultures. So this is a very dangerous scope to imagine. We cannot be the world’s repository of graphic design history. But what we have tried to do is to bring in, with the help of people on the ground who know the languages and the cultures, underrepresented work in representative collections that enrich what we can offer.

EI: Yeah, I saw a post on your blog introducing the archive in Hindi.

RS: So that was sort of the idea: Let’s bring more of the canon in (we didn’t have a good Book of Hours, for example), but let’s also expand. Let’s fill in the holes that really matter, that will allow us to be a solid teaching collection and then let’s expand the canon a lot. We tend to use the word inclusion a lot because diversity, where the immediate assumption is racial and class-based, women and minorities, is too limiting for what we’re talking about. We have a much bigger context: whole other continents, cultures, scripts.

We don’t want to think of it in a parochial way. We want to think of it in an expansive way and find commonalities across scripts and cultures. Scripts that are made with the same tools have lots of commonalities and aesthetic echoes. I love it when somebody sees something here that’s not in a cultural script they understand or recognize and it inspires what they do, what they recognize, in their own script and culture.

EI: You once said that serendipity is key to the Archive experience. What did you mean by that?

RS: There are a couple of ways to approach that. One is, when someone visits, we do tours in person. We also do tours online with docents who speak eight languages. It’s a similar thing to a tabletop tour, except that it’s handled under a live camera or it’s some mix of presentation modalities. But it’s similar material.

In person, you experience serendipity because you come to a table set full of objects. There are six tables here and there might be 50 objects. And you will very likely have made a few specific requests. But we always try to add some stuff you didn’t ask for and we really hope that that’s the stuff that inspires you. We try to do that with all requests and all tours, so that there’s an opportunity for serendipity.

With the online archive, the very nature of an online archive is that it’s a hierarchy of metadata in text that organizes the material. So the question is, how can you have a visually serendipitous experience? We try very hard to have the text be powerful and useful, but to get it out of the way very quickly so that you reach rich fields of somewhat random thumbnails as quickly as possible. Then you can drill down by clicking through image pathways. So those design elements in the online archive were very much intended to replicate that in-person serendipity.

EI: Your editorial director has said that humility is a big part of your hosting practice, that many of your visitors are well-informed and you actually listen to them.

RS: All the time.

EI: Can you elaborate on that?

RS: Oh, yeah, we often have people who are more knowledgeable than we are about things in the archive. So we want to be open to that and capture that information. A good example was last weekend when there was an international type conference at Stanford University, and there were people from 20 countries in this room looking at objects and teaching us stuff about them. That’s one aspect of humility. The other is in the way that we present the collection: We try not to be the know-it-alls, so you’re not afraid to ask a question. We do not want to intimidate with knowledge.

EI: How does having a tactile experience of the artifacts change how people understand the work you’re sharing?

RS: We’re in an age where most graphic design is on screens, so it doesn’t have tactility. But real objects in the real world hold a fascination for us. The physical aspect of a thing, and especially being able to touch a thing, gives you a connection you can’t otherwise get. It makes people think and feel. And when it’s a historical object, there’s just some kind of magic. ❤