Collections

Our team is devoted to the preservation and access of the Archive’s collection. We selected objects that mean something to each of us — a first project, a piece we’d only ever seen in textbooks, work that inspires our own creative practices, and stories we know need to be told over and over again.

In our stacks, exploring the concept of personal identity is in conversation with identity systems. The same room is home to both NASA's brand guidelines (arguably the world's most famous standards manual) and stories at risk of being lost or suppressed. Redaction and Passport of Witness are visual reminders, forcibly present in the face of the active erasure of the histories of marginalized people. Dua (Prayer) embodies the fleshiness of memory, resembling the crumbling architecture of an image of home. This book may never be shown in the artist's native country for political reasons. A few shelving bays away, an illustrated book on Brazilian commercial logo design uses symbols to demonstrate how we communicate through pages of vibrating colors.

Our collection also tells design stories through technique and technology. A Milwaukee transit ticket is part of a collection that reflects the rapid changes in printing technologies over the span of 30 years. Super Tipo Veloz was a system of 555 unique metal type forms that could be recombined into both letterforms and illustration. The repetition of calligraphic letters transforms a poem from a piece of writing to an image. Cours de Theorie pour le Tissage (Weaving Theory Course) is a student's journey via fabric samples created on the Jacquard loom, a 19th-century proto-computer that strung together punch cards to mechanize the weaving process. In the Bay Area, where technological determinism shouts from the billboards along the Bay Bridge, visiting archives offers antidotes—a reminder that human agency and cultural contexts shape technological developments, not the other way around.