ERIC JOHNSON: When was the last time you *really* looked at a neon sign, or a menu, or a chopstick wrapper? What if I told you that these things are not ordinary... They're art?

STEPHEN COLES: And you may or may not think about the artistry behind it, but there is someone making these things. There's a human designing the letters that go on that chopstick sleeve, or there's somebody thinking about what paper is used or the way it's printed.

ERIC: That's Stephen Coles, associate curator and editorial director at Letterform Archive. He says lots of museums have great collections of graphic design, but most of them don't even show it.

STEPHEN: Graphic design has not really been a collecting area of major art museums until fairly recently. And yet it's something that we all experience every day and many, many people are interested in being inspired by.

ERIC: Letterform Archive publishes books about typefaces, teaches people how to design their own, and showcases parts of their collection at a small gallery in San Francisco. But this special collections library is also the place to go if you want to see and touch hundreds of years of design history.

STEPHEN: Let's say you don't have any idea the history of sign making, but you're interested in hand-painted signs or neon signs. You can say, "This is my interest. What do you have?" So when those requests come in, it's like a hive mind and people just... Somebody's asking for stuff that's yellow. What do we do?

ERIC: This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. Today on the podcast, why do we always need more fonts? Will AI ever be able to help designers make great art? And why shouldn't you wear gloves when handling old books? We'll talk about all of that and more with Stephen Coles from Letterform Archive, right after this.

ERIC: This episode is sponsored by Transistor.fm. If you are starting a podcast, then you should use Transistor. Upload your audio or video and they'll publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and more. Go to transistor.fm for a 14-day free trial. On this podcast, we believe that everyone's experience with museums is deeply personal, and that's why we want to hear your museum stories. If you've got one, and I bet you do, please submit it at our website, likemuseum.com. Just go to the website, likemuseum.com, and click "submit a museum story" at the top of the page. It might just make it into a future episode. Thanks.

I like to start all these interviews by talking to people about their personal relationship to museums. Before we talk about where you work, could you tell me about what the word "museum" means to you generally?

STEPHEN: Ah, interesting. Well, I think as a kid, the first experience at what I would consider kind of a museum was Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City, Utah, which was a zoo, essentially.

ERIC: Really?

STEPHEN: But I thought of it as a museum in a way, and I was able to work there as a teenager volunteering and taking care of sick birds. So that was my first experience. But "museum" to me, it just means it's giving you an opportunity to see and experience things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to and to get new expertise and information about those things, even if they're really common everyday things, which I think we'll talk about, but that it will give you a new way of seeing the world.

ERIC: Yeah. And you mentioned, so your first time working in a museum was at this aviary when you were a teenager. What about as a visitor? Do you remember as a kid the first time you went to a museum, anything that left an impression on you?

STEPHEN: Yeah, I think as a kid, we had a natural history museum, we had other kinds of museums in Salt Lake City where I grew up, but I think actually the one that I probably experienced, and I don't even know if you would qualify it as a museum, but it was at Epcot Center at Disney World.

ERIC: Yeah, that's entertainment, sort of.

STEPHEN: Yeah, exactly. And there were parts of that ... It was actually, that was the part of that experience that I enjoyed most was the part that was more on the educational side than the entertainment side. I was like, "Oh yeah, you can go to a place and learn about something outside of school." That was really fascinating to me, and that you could use other methods of teaching beyond just books and a chalkboard. So yeah, I loved Epcot. It was like, "Oh, I'm traveling all over the world and I'm just in one place."

ERIC: I'll tell you something embarrassing, which is that it's been about 10 years since I've been to Disney World and they've added all these new roller coasters, all these cool high-tech rides. And in those past 10 years, I've learned that you can go on a walking tour of the greenhouse area where they grow the vegetables.

STEPHEN: That's what I would have been into.

ERIC: The "Living With the Land" ride, they have a walking tour there and I'm like, "Yes, sign me up." Next time.

STEPHEN: I would've been all about that too, yeah.

ERIC: Well, let's talk about the Letterform Archive. Could you talk about the history of the Letterform Archive and what you do there?

STEPHEN: Yeah, so it started really as one person's collection of calligraphy, graphic design, old rare books. His name is Rob Saunders, he's still our executive director. He started this collection decades ago just for personal use and over time started to realize that other people were as interested as he was in the history of where letters come from. And so it really opened in 2015 in his home, basically doing what he was already doing, which is inviting friends to come over and look at cool stuff. And I was lucky to be one of those people that was around before he made that decision. The goal was really to give a space and a priority to this part of graphic design culture that is housed in other museums. SFMOMA has a great graphic design collection, but you won't see it very often actually. You'll see fine art and photography because that's the focus of the museum.

But graphic design has not really been a collecting area of major art museums until fairly recently. And yet it's something that we all experience every day and many, many people are interested in being inspired by. So he realized, given that there isn't a place that has this kind of focus, instead of donating it somewhere where it might just get locked away and not seen very often, he said, "Why don't I start something new that can really be all about the history of the letterform and how these letters are made and how they can inspire us in what we're doing today?"

ERIC: Why do you think it is that this field does not get the same sort of recognition in museum spaces? Why is it that this stuff gets stowed away in the back storage and not shown in exhibits? Is it just that it seems too functional for a museum to care about? What's your theory?

STEPHEN: That's part of it. It's that, it's also that it's common in many ways. If you think about some of the things we have in our collection, chopstick wrapper sleeves or record covers or the kinds of things that you might experience on a daily basis is not often thought of as being important. And then there's also the aspect of art versus commerce. And there's always that battle of this is not at the same plane or level of fine art because it's done for a client, it's not done for yourself. And so even though a lot of the craft and a lot of the skills that people have to create graphic design are similar to skills that fine artists have, and there's a lot of crossover and a lot of people do both, it's not often thought of as something to preserve, to share, to hold in a museum space.

But for us, we feel like there are two things that really make it a great kind of museum experience. One is no matter who you are, if you come to Letterform Archive, you're going to see something that you are familiar with, that you have some connection to, whether it's a transit pass that you have already used in your daily life or a chopstick wrapper sleeve. These things are things you're encountering every day and you may or may not think about the artistry behind it, but there is someone making these things. There's a human designing the letters that go on that chopstick sleeve or there's somebody thinking about what paper is used or the way it's printed. It is a pretty exciting thing to be able to open up this hidden world behind what everybody is experiencing every day.

ERIC: Can you talk about Rob's background and your background? What got you into this sort of design in the first place? How did you wind up at his house looking at all these old designs?

STEPHEN: His background is in publishing. He published children's books. One of the most famous authors he published was Eric Carle, author of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," although that was a different book than the others that he published. But he had a really successful publishing company, and his initial interest was in calligraphy. Kind of like me, we're both kind of dropouts from school. We both just got so interested in one thing that we figured out how to really dig deep into that thing and didn't really want to study anything else, just studied on our own. So for him, it was calligraphy, and he learned that the Newberry Library in Chicago had an amazing collection of calligraphy and was one of the more open institutions in terms of allowing you access to these rare books, that you didn't have to be working at a university or a master's student to go in and see anything in the collection.

And that kind of ethos is really what he started the archive behind is allowing anybody to have that access. For me, it was working at a newspaper at university. It was at the University of Utah, it was a daily newspaper. So every day we could try something new, it would get printed, we'd see how people react to it, and we could try something new the next day. And before the internet, before the web, that was really the best way you could experiment and learn from graphic design is by working at a newspaper. So I was really lucky that that was my education, really. I just hung out in the offices, learned from editors and writers, and played with fonts and layouts. So that was my way into this field. When we started, it was really for the type nerds and then the really intense graphic designers who really wanted to dig into history.

But now we have people of all walks of life and all professions because today, because of the tools we have, everybody is making design decisions in one way or another, whether it's selecting a font from a font menu or they're creating a post in social media, they're all making graphic design decisions, whereas even 30 years ago that wasn't really happening. So it means that everybody is creating in this way and they're often looking for inspiration. They're looking for understanding of how this stuff is done. And we feel like providing that inspiration, not only historical, but also in an analog form, in a handmade form, is something that's really in demand right now given that everyone, when they're looking online, is seeing the same thing over and over again.

ERIC: Adjacent to the gallery space, there's a classroom that you use sometimes for programming, but could you also talk about how you make that space accessible — usable — to members of the public who come in? How do they come in? How do they use that space?

STEPHEN: Well, there's a lot of uses for it. The main use is for our type design program. So the people who really want to dig in deep and want to learn how fonts are made, they can take a full-year program in type design. This episode's coming out on the last week of the application period for next year, so you can still apply if you're interested.

ERIC: Act now! Supplies are limited. (laughter)

STEPHEN: But it's a really unique program in which, two nights a week, a few weekends a year, you're really getting into the professional tools and fundamentals of creating typefaces. That is what we use the space for for those parts of the week. We also have public workshops. So anybody, even if you're not part of that program, you can sign up for a workshop. I teach one that's about type selection. So we were talking about how do you choose fonts? We have a weekend workshop around that. We have calligraphy workshops and other kinds of hands-on lettering and other analog ways of making letters. And then we've also done things like branding and web design and anything that involves typography, really.

ERIC: Correct me if I'm wrong, there's also days where people can come in and they can request, "Can you pull certain types of items from the stacks?" for their research or just for their own enjoyment, right?

STEPHEN: That's right. So that's in our reading room, which is next to the classroom. And in the reading room, we use that space ... The original concept of Letterform Archive was in Rob's home. He basically took the living room furniture out and put a big set of tables in so that we could walk around a table looking at objects together. That concept has continued to the current space where we can do tours of the collection. We call them intro tours. We do them monthly where you can learn about what we hold and some history behind each of those objects. And then we do research visits, which is what you're mentioning, which is where anybody can basically have the experience he had when he visited the Newberry where he didn't know exactly which books to ask for, although he was very knowledgeable about calligraphy.

They did have a catalog and you have a standard catalog and paging system where you write down what you want and then they bring it to you. But we're a little bit different than most special collections libraries in that we aren't fully cataloged. It's a drawback in some ways, but it also means that we are allowing anything that comes into the collection to be accessible, even if it's not yet cataloged, which means we can take a donation and, once it's processed, it's given safe housing and a place to live, then we can make that available to people to see. And we also can do it in a way that is a little bit more intuitive and interactive. So let's say you don't have any idea the history of, let's say, sign making, but you're interested in hand-painted signs or neon signs, you can say, "This is my interest. What do you have?"

And then we can bring out to you books that are basically the instruction manuals that sign painters of old used. We can bring models from the French turn of the century where they were alphabets that were hand-painted and other sign painters used, and we can share those with you. And we can bring original artwork, which you got to see some of when you came to visit, of neon signs that were made in San Francisco, and these were comps or models of what those signs would look like. So we can bring all these out to you, you can request these things, you spend a couple hours with them, but you can also use that time to understand what you are really into. And so during that visit, there's an opportunity to explore and dig deeper. And I think that's different than a standard special collections library experience because usually you're just picking from a catalog, looking at those books, and then you're done until you make another request.

Whereas we love to explore with you. We love to figure out what it is you're really into and how you're going to be most inspired and continue to dig deeper.

ERIC: So if not all of the collection is cataloged, is it just relying on people's memories to find stuff? How do you find stuff if you don't know everything about every item in the collection?

STEPHEN: That is the beauty of our team. We have a team of traditional librarians, of people like me who just grew up loving letters, to Rob who had the initial collection, to an amazing collections team that is always creating lists of what to share with our students and our visitors. So when those requests come in, it's like a hive mind and people just ... Somebody's asking for stuff that's yellow, what do we do? And everyone just chimes in with their recommendations. It just depends on what the topic is. So if it's about artists' books, for example, then we have an expert on staff for that. If it's about medieval manuscripts, someone else might have more knowledge. So it's a really great team that understands the collection in different ways and can always serve people's needs.

ERIC: So who's the sort of person who comes in and taps this expertise, taps this enthusiasm you all have? Is it an academic? Is it fellow designers? Is it just geeks who love design? All of the above?

STEPHEN: All of the above. And that's what I was saying that it's so cool how the audience has evolved from our beginnings. I'm a type nerd, I'm a font nerd, and so I was really part of that initial group, but that circle has continued to broaden, initially to graphic designers who that was their profession and they are looking for inspiration. And then to calligraphers who they want to see a 16th-century writing book because that's part of their holy grail is how letters should be made. But it's expanded now into poets and writers and people who are working in the tech industry and maybe they do a little bit of design or art direction or UX for one of our major tech companies in the areas and they're just looking for something that is on paper or made by hand or is not the same kind of inspiration that they're scrolling through every day.

And so it is a really wide gamut of people. Yes, academics, we have people that come from around the world to see some of the rarer things in the collection, but also people who came in just because we have the gallery and there's open hours for the gallery, they came to see an exhibition, they got interested in one aspect of it, and then they came back for a research visit just wanting to see more. It could be any walk of life, really.

ERIC: When I came to visit the Letterform Archive, the first thing you had me do was wash my hands. Could you explain why?

STEPHEN: Great question, yeah. So because you were coming basically during a research visit where you're going to be handling material from the collection, the first thing we ask anyone to do if they're coming to handle old books, and one of the things that's always a surprise to people is that we don't use gloves. We don't use cotton gloves, which you'll often see these things in film or TV shows whenever something old is being handled. And it's kind of more just for show than it is for actual library and special collections practice. There's certain things that you should handle with gloves like photographs, things like that. But for old books, it's really clean, dry hands is the thing that's going to be safest because it's the oils on your hands, maybe a little dirt like that that's going to cause the most damage. But gloves, they take away the tactile abilities of the person who's handling the book.

And so you may accidentally tear or fold something that you wouldn't necessarily have if you could feel it. But the other aspect of it is we just really do want people to have a firsthand hands-on knowledge of these things that they're experiencing. And that's what's different than a standard museum where you're only seeing things behind glass. A library or special collections library is a place where you can actually interact with the things that you're looking at. And that's something that's super important for books that have very specific structure or they're printed on or written on vellum versus paper or they have a weight to them that you wouldn't otherwise understand unless you could hold it in your hands. There's also something that is hard to describe but is super important for us. We've seen it with many different kinds of visitors, which is when you have a group of objects on a table that you may have requested or we recommended to you and you're interacting with those as a group, it's very different than when it has been curated and presented to you on a wall in a museum with a very specific order and certain things are next to each other for a good reason, but it doesn't give you the opportunity to interact with those things, pair things together that you wouldn't normally have seen together if a professional curator did it.

This interaction with a group of items on a table is a kind of magical thing, which I just think you need in order to really understand and get the most out of those objects.

ERIC: Well, there's also the serendipity, I would think.

STEPHEN: Absolutely.

ERIC: For you as a designer, if you're looking at a huge, as your field of vision is covered with all these different options, as opposed to if I'm working in Canva or whatever, I'm trying to pick a font there, I'm scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through the list and I'm seeing maybe 10 at a time, you're able to curate a full feast for people of all these different options and all these different sources of inspiration.

STEPHEN: Yeah, absolutely. And you're just experiencing it in a different modality, which is ... The book is just an incredible form for a lot of reasons, but it's also that you can have a thing that's filled with information that, if you were to have it in an exhibit, you'd only see one spread and that's it. But to be able to page through something, understand [it], it's almost cinematic in a way, it's got a pacing and a structure and a way that you experience that text and content that maybe only in film on a wall in a museum could you experience, but yes, then it's also being able to have something that is personally recommended to you by our staff on a table in association with other objects that starts firing synapses that wouldn't otherwise.

ERIC: We were talking before we recorded about another museum here in the city that's using AI in one of their exhibits, and I'm wondering how you as a designer think about AI. Can you envision a future where designers are using AI in some way or where AI itself is able to do interesting work with typefaces?

STEPHEN: If we could get beyond the ethical questions of whether we should use AI at all, then I think yeah, there are some ways that it can be useful, especially in terms of analyzing existing data or work and giving you ideas. There are thousands of typefaces out there, for example, and there's no way you're going to be able to browse them all yourself. And so I could envision a way in which it could help narrow things down for you. You could give it some ... I'm looking for something that comes from the 19th century in terms of historical background and is usable for large headlines and maybe comes from the Iberian peninsula, and maybe it can help narrow down those choices for you. I think that's something that AI could be very good at is just helping sort through a really huge corpus of data, and that can include typefaces.

ERIC: Not everyone has the Letterform Archive at their disposal to find everything that's been yellow that's been made in the past 100 years.

STEPHEN: Yes. But at the same time, I think what's interesting about something like Letterform Archive is that you're going to a place that has already had some decisions made or people interacting and donating to that collection of material. So it's already been narrowed in a way. And then the next stage is you coming with your ideas and interests and then our team bringing their own experience and creating something, again, that I think is going to be different than anything you would get from AI because it's combining all of these human experiences.

ERIC: The other reason I wanted to ask about AI is I feel like graphic design does not often enter the public consciousness, it doesn't become discourse super often, but it has recently because restaurants around the world have started using AI to make, in my opinion — feel free to disagree — extremely ugly menus and flyers and posters. Do you have any understanding of what's going on there? What is the AI thinking when it makes those sort of design choices? Because I think everyone seems to agree that they really suck.

STEPHEN: I'm sure it will get better, but I imagine that typography and the written word has been one of the last things the AI has been able to kind of master. And so already it's started late in terms of being able to generate quality text with any kind of aesthetic interest to it. So that's already a blocker. But the other thing is just this concept of taking the average of what already exists out in the world. And so if it's only pulling in from existing menus and websites and just kind of merging them together into something, to this kind of mush of content, it's not coming with, again, if you're not prompting it well, but if you're not giving it a lot of really specific instructions, it's just going to give you the best possible outcome of a combination of lots of existing things rather than having a very clear vision and identity and brand to it and then composing something.

Any AI can produce an image or a graphic design that is okay, but it will never do something that is unique or great.

ERIC: It'll hit the average. It'll hit the 50% median.

STEPHEN: It'll give you the content, you'll be able to see it and you'll know that, okay, I can get a bowl of rice for three bucks, but —

ERIC: And the bowl of rice will look like some abomination.

STEPHEN: Yeah, that's right. There may be all sorts of issues with the hand that's holding the bowl of rice and how many digits it has.

ERIC: Yes.

STEPHEN: Part of what graphic designers learn early on is about what they call now branding or identity design. And that is understanding what is the identity of the restaurant, for example, that you're conveying. And you start with that before you create a menu because you are making a decision about, okay, do we want to look like a mom-and-pop shop that is quickly whipping this up? Then maybe we should just write it by hand. Or do we want to feel like we're super posh and we need to use high-quality materials and we want to have a menu that is reflective of the prices that we have on it? Then that is another decision, but you're making ... Those are just the very broad [strokes], then you're narrowing it into what's our story? Where does the food come from? Why do we make it this way? Who is the founder and what is their story?

So that's all about building a brand and identity that is, hopefully, unique. And that's the opposite of what AI does, which is to combine all the existing identities and make something that's average.

ERIC: Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free, and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit subscribe there too. Thank you so much. When you sign up for the "Call 'Em Like Museum" newsletter at likemuseum.com, you'll get weekly updates on all of our new episodes, and you're automatically entered in our gift shop giveaway. Our 12 prize packages include items from the museums featured on this season of the show. It's free, it's easy, and it only takes a few seconds. Just head to likemuseum.com to sign up. That's likemuseum.com. Good luck.

So most of the museums that come on this show, we have to talk about what it's like to go there. You were good enough to bring some items from the Letterform Archive into the studio today, so I was wondering if you could show — you can show to your camera over there — some of the things you have, and then can you explain what is it we're looking at? Why did you bring these things in? What makes them special?

STEPHEN: This one, the first one I'm holding up here, is a label for a strawberry soda for Fred Meyer, which is a grocery store some people around the country may know. It was designed by Lehmann Lithography, which is a San Francisco company. They were active from the early 1900s or maybe even late 1800s up to the midpart of the century. And this is produced around the '20s during Prohibition when there were lots of mixers and other kinds of non-alcoholic beverages. But the beauty of this, and you'll only really get to appreciate it when you come in person and see, is it's hand painted. So this is gouache and ink done with brush and pen and just beautifully rendered by anonymous artists working at this company to show a client and say, "This is what your beverage label will look like if you print it this way."

ERIC: And is this a print or is this the original?

STEPHEN: It's the original hand-painted label. We have about 200 of these and we love to show them in in-person visits because the first thing I ask is, "How do you think this was printed?"

ERIC: Yes.

STEPHEN: As the trick question. And they usually say, "Oh, I don't know." And then they get in there with a loupe and they see the brush strokes. One of the things we love to also do is really high-fidelity photography. So if you go to our online archive on our website, you can see these labels there too.

ERIC: Yes. And then the other thing you have here is called a Letraset.

STEPHEN: Yeah. So the company is called Letraset, but the format really is transfer type or rub-down lettering. And folks who maybe are Gen X or older would probably be familiar with this tool or this product. It was a very quick way to get lettering on paper to make zines or any kind of independent publication. Basically what you do is you've got a set of letters and you've got this backing sheet here. When you take the sheet off, it's kind of sticky like decals, and you use a pen or what's called a burnisher or any kind of tool to rub down the letters right onto the surface. So it's essentially the most democratic way to set type. Back from 50 years ago to all the way to the invention of printing, it cost a lot of money to set up a shop where you would have metal type, wood type, a letterpress studio, and all sorts of materials and tools and expertise to set type.

When this came around around the 1950s and really start to get used in the '60s and '70s and onward, this really enabled all sorts of new publications to happen. And one of the things that we show this with is the Black Panther newspaper. The Black Panther Party started here in Oakland and in San Francisco, and they would not have been able to get the message out nearly as well without tools like this that enabled them to do it without a lot of funding. Didn't need to have advertisers, didn't need to cow to some tech billionaire who wanted them to say a certain thing. They could use really cheap tools to get the message out. Emory Douglas, who was the minister of culture of the Black Panther Party, is someone whose work and newspapers we show and his methods we show because it's a really interesting way that technology combined with these movements to create new work.

ERIC: It's so tempting to think of desktop publishing and of tools like Photoshop or InDesign as like, oh, that's technology, but this is technology too.

STEPHEN: Absolutely.

ERIC: Yeah. This is extremely important technology for history. Yeah.

STEPHEN: That's right. Yeah. I mean, before the computer, there were other technologies. The printing press was super important initially in increasing literacy worldwide and allowing printing to happen at a new scale. But it really wasn't until the 20th century that you have these kinds of technologies that opened it up to almost anybody.

ERIC: No gatekeepers. Exactly. Yeah. Now as associate curator, editorial director, you are involved in, I assume, both the publishing side and the museum side. You're working with both casual visitors — casual fans — and professional designers. Is there a future goal or ambition you have for either of those audiences, something you want to do with the Letterform Archive to benefit either of those groups?

STEPHEN: We also have another arm to this Hydra of a museum, which is our publishing program. And we have a publisher who's in charge of that, Lucie Parker, and we do these incredible books that are based on the collection that allow you to take part of the archive home with you. And we often get that from visitors who are like, "Oh, I love this thing." And now for some of our most popular collections and ones that have a really interesting story, we have these wonderful books. And they're also available in bookstores all over the world, so that's another way that people find out about us. But that is one aspect that we're continuing to grow. I want more people to be able to see the museum through those books.

The online archive is another one that we want to grow more. We're just about to launch a new version of that that'll have a lot more objects. Currently there are, I think, 5,000 images on the online archive, so there's a lot you can view even though it's just a snippet of the 100,000-object collection. But the main thing that I'm trying to do as a curator is to better represent the world. Currently, 90% of what we learn in graphic design history in America is very Eurocentric. It's very white male centric. And so representing underserved and underrepresented in history, people, places, scripts, writing systems is something that we're really focused on right now. And that also reflects the people who visit. We have a lot of Asian visitors, Latino visitors. We've got people from all over the world who come and they don't all speak English or write in the Latin alphabet.

And there's such incredible histories of letter design from other parts of the world. So we're starting to grow in those areas too and invite people who have expertise in those scripts to help expand the collection with us.

ERIC: I heard something interesting recently. I just visited Mexico City with my partner and she was telling me that the reason we know so much about the Aztecs is that the conquistadors came, Cortez came, and the Aztecs wrote down their own history using the conquistadors' script. They were just like, "Wow, this alphabet is so interesting. We'll use it too."

STEPHEN: Yeah, that's interesting. I know. And it's kind of a shame because some of these Native American writing systems and other ways of recording language have fallen away because it was consciously erased by colonialism. But yeah, it is so true that history is really based on who wrote it down, and it's even more true in terms of lettering history. And so yeah, we're trying to expand that story as much as we can. One of the exciting things is that we've had people take Type West, our type design program, who ... It's both online and in person, so the online cohort comes from all over the world. We've had people who are creating fonts in writing systems that have been underserved, like the Filipino native writing system is called baybayan, and it has not been served by fonts very well because it's just so seldom used, but all of these young people are revisiting it.

So that's an example of something ... Now there can be new fonts in the world because somebody took a program and learned how to create typefaces and went back to their ancestral script and started creating new tools to use it.

ERIC: That's so important. This goes way beyond just let's make a prettier font for some brand, for some corporation. This has a deep connection in some cases to cultures where the language, where there's oral traditions and there's the aspects of the culture that are otherwise not going to survive unless someone intentionally, actively, chooses to use these tools.

STEPHEN: That's right. It works with Native scripts in North America too. There's the Canadian syllabary, for example, that is starting to get more and more support for those who are still using it and allowing that to then spread to more use. But then also just, yes, there should be more cool logos in baybayan. Why shouldn't a new restaurant that is serving Filipino food bring some of that culture into the menus and the visual language of that restaurant?

ERIC: That's all right, I'll just use ChatGPT. [laughter] So what's the best thing you've ever heard a visitor to the Letterform Archive say? Do you have a favorite story of something someone has said while you've been there?

STEPHEN: My wife jokes that we have a logo that's built of basically a circle of A's basically to represent language, the alphabet. But she says, "Actually, I thought it was representing the sound that is uttered by people when they come in and see something that they've never seen before."

ERIC: Ahhhhhh.

STEPHEN: There's a kind of an epiphany or excitement. You hear oohs and ahs all the time, and it's so fun. And that's why I love doing things like the tours and the research visits. It's just fascinating how many ... Because graphic design is so ubiquitous and so many of the people who made the things that are in our collection are actually part of our community, we get people visiting all the time who can tell us more about the object than we could. And that is humbling and great, and it is one of my favorite things when you host a tour.

I hosted a tour and shared something that it turned out the person in the room had made that thing or was a big part of making that thing. And that's Susan Kare, who was the original designer of the Macintosh writings or fonts in the Mac and the icons and all of the graphical user interface. And she could tell me stuff about the thing I had on the table and it was just a real joy. I mean, already it was one of my heroes, but to be able to have her talk about what we were showing was really special.

ERIC: What's something that people get wrong about what you do?

STEPHEN: We were talking about the explosion — maybe overwhelming volume — of fonts out in the world and people often say, "Do we need any more?" If there are hundreds of thousands of fonts, how could we even need another one? But it's the same answer you give to people about do we need another song, if you want to look at it from the artistic point of view. But if you want to look at it from a design and a user point of view, I often compare typefaces to chairs. The chair has been done. [laughter] We've had them for millennia, for hundreds of thousands of years, but they're always being redesigned because we have different needs, we have different inspirations, we have different rooms, we have different body types. We have all sorts of reasons for designing new chairs, even though in its essence, it's a very simple form, but it makes a room in a lot of ways.

You come into this space and it's the first thing that you see and it's a thing you use. So a typeface is very similar to a chair in that way. It's both visual, it sets a mood, but it's also very about the function. That's what's fascinating about typeface design is that it's this excellent combination of those two things, of form and function together, that really make it successful.

ERIC: Is there a difference between a typeface and a font? Do I sound ignorant if I mix those up?

STEPHEN: You're not ignorant. No, it's only the most pedantic people like me that would tell you there's a difference. Mainly it's about the difference between — and now I'm dating myself again — but a song and an MP3.

ERIC: Okay.

STEPHEN: So the song is the creative work. It's the thing that you're experiencing. The MP3 is just a vehicle to get it to you. It's a vessel container. The font is the MP3 in this analogy, so it's just a way to deliver it to you. But the typeface is the thing you're looking at.

ERIC: That's the artistry. That's the thing that the designer has really crafted is the typeface.

STEPHEN: Those forms, the letter forms they drew, is the typeface, and the font is how we access it and use it.

ERIC: We started the conversation talking about the first museum you worked at and the first museum that you went to as a kid. In the rest of your life, either your childhood or your adult life, is there a time you've been to a museum and it just blew your head off? Like it just, wow, you had that "ahhhh" experience for yourself?

STEPHEN: I lived in Berlin on and off for a few years, and my favorite museum there is Museum der Dinge, which means the Museum of Things.

ERIC: Ooh.

STEPHEN: And it's so basic, in a way. It is exactly that.

ERIC: It's a museum of things.

STEPHEN: But it's the things from other eras. It's almost as if you're opening the cabinet of a kitchen in 1935, what would you see? And so they kind of categorize it that way, but it's everyday objects. And some of them are very iconic designs, but others are just, that was the packaging of flour at that time. And that ... For a graphic designer and people who really are interested in this visual culture that surrounds us, it's really fun to experience at a museum level, and really transporting too because it takes you into that other time and place.

ERIC: Yeah. Is there anything from that experience that you've been able to, or from other experiences you've had, that you've been able to apply at the Letterform Archive, like things you've been able to do that you weren't doing previously with the space?

STEPHEN: We have a tiny little gallery and we can do similar things to that with it. We have artists, solo artist shows, but we also have shows such as the Bauhaus typography show where we displayed a wide range of what was being done at that German school at that time. And that's what's great about the gallery, is anybody can come in and see that during open hours. But I think those tours and research visits I was talking to you about are really the way we do that best because those tables change every time and every day and they fit the interests and the enthusiasm and the passions of those who come in. And so to me, that's where we make that magic happen.

ERIC: Last question for you, hardest question of the whole interview: When you are in a museum gift shop, what do you buy?

STEPHEN: Yeah, I tend to buy things that I would use. And so usually it's like a nifty product design or something that feels like something that I would use in the house. I think the last time, an example of that was a ... It's a thing that opens up like a book, but it's actually a light and it's kind of diffused by the pages of the book as you open it.

ERIC: Oh. Wait, so it's a book holder or it's a —

STEPHEN: No, it's just a lamp, but it looks like a book. It's like a plywood binding or book covers, and then when it opens, it's this plastic diffused cover that look like pages of a book and it's just an LED light inside.

ERIC: That's so cool. I should have known that someone like you would have really cool designy shit like that. [laugh]

STEPHEN: Yeah, that was the last thing, I think, I bought at a museum store, but otherwise it's books themselves.

ERIC: Well, I can also say that Letterform Archive has a great gift shop as well. Should have mentioned that. Stephen, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. It's great seeing you again.

STEPHEN: Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much.

ERIC: Thanks again to Stephen Coles for coming on the podcast. Letterform Archive is in San Francisco, and its gallery is open Thursday through Sunday. On their website, you can also book a research visit for Friday or Saturday morning. The link to do that is in the description.

Now, it took me forever to decide what to buy in the gift shop, but I ultimately landed on this set of 40 postcards featuring beautiful designs from Belle Époque Paris. And I didn't buy this for myself, I'm giving it away! If you want it, you should sign up for our free email newsletter at likemuseum.com. The entry window closes in just one week, on November 10th, so better act fast.

Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, LightningPod. Our social media specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Julia Kranzler. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you at the museum.