Letterform Archive

  • 2,229 photos
  • 2.8M views
  • Member since 2024
  • Last upload was
    September 2025
  • 🇺🇸
Based in San Francisco, Letterform Archive is a nonprofit center for inspiration, education, publishing, and community. As a library and museum, we offer radical access to a collection of over 100,000 items related to calligraphy, lettering, typography, and graphic design. This Flickr account primarily features our own photos with no known copyright restriction (but please contact us if you are a rights holder who believes otherwise). The images we share here supplement our Online Archive and editorial content. Many of the images are quick snapshots to fulfill research requests and invite context from the Flickr community. For images captured with our hi-fi photography, and other reproduction requests, please visit our site.

When were these photos taken?

230
1957
2024

 

Where were these photos taken?

15% of these photos are geotagged.

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Recent uploads

The last upload was September 2025.

Conversations

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Kompakte Grotesk

from Letterform Archive

  • Letterform Archive said:

"Gothic"

from Letterform Archive

  • Florian Hardwig said:
    This is a Cyrillic adaptation of Lichte Initialen (“open initials”) as drawn by Emil Rudolf Weiß in 1935 and later assigned to his Weiß-Gotisch.

Inglesa Excelsior, Gans specimen

from Letterform Archive

  • Florian Hardwig said:
    Many of the typefaces cast by Gans originated elsewhere. Inglesa Excelsior is a version of Stempel’s Künstler-Schreibschrift. It has the same alternates. About the only differences that I can spot are its non-ligning numerals, the alternate non-descending G, the R with smaller bowl, and the ampersand:

  • Florian Hardwig said:
    Correction: Künstler-Schreibschrift itself is a reworking of Deberny’s Écritures calligraphiques. Judging from the details listed above, it looks like Inglesa Excelsior is actually a version of the French design.

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