Letterform Archive

  • 2,169 photos
  • 2M views
  • Member since 2024
  • Last upload was
    5 June
  • 🇺🇸
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?

2025-06-09T16:22:02.232741 image/svg+xml Matplotlib v3.10.3, https://matplotlib.org/ 1957 2023 200

Where were these photos taken?

15% of these photos are geotagged.

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Photos of interest

These photos have had lots of views, comments, and favourites.

Recent uploads

The last upload was 5 June.

Conversations

Here’s a selection of the conversations happening on these photos::

"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.

Bth. 013-1 Akzidenz-Grotesk breit fett

from Letterform Archive

  • Florian Hardwig said:
    A reminder (to myself) that the index cards inevitably show a snapshot in time, and don’t always include all glyphs that were available for a given typeface. Akzidenz-Grotesk breit fett additionally had a wider alternate r at one point. Also, the forms for a and g here presented as alternates were the default in Berthold’s Probe No. 476.

L&M 087-1 Presto

from Letterform Archive

  • Florian Hardwig said:
    Presto was designed by Helmut Matheis (1917–2021) and first cast by Ludwig & Mayer in 1970.

    To celebrate Matheis’ 100th birthday in November 2017, Fust & Friends released a digitization of Presto made by Andreas Seidel, at my initiative and with the authorisation of Matheis, based on a specimen courtesy of Hans Reichardt. Since 2021, Presto is available from Astype.

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