Join OPEN SET organizer Lang Ingalls and exhibiting artist Beth Redmond—recipient of the Highly Commendable award in the Design Tension in Foretelling Content category—for a discussion on contemporary design bookbinding and selected works from the OPEN SET exhibition.

Exploring themes of tension, harmony, and movement, the evening will highlight prizewinning works and design bindings that feature unique structures and content. Don't miss this rare opportunity to view these exquisite pieces outside their exhibition cases!

Doors open at 6:00 pm; event will begin promptly at 6:30 pm.

Thursday, March 27, 2025
6:00 PM

A legendary lettering artist takes us on a 50-year journey through iconic logos, album covers, and the shift from analog to digital tools.

Renowned artist Gerard Huerta has applied the art of hand lettering across a diverse range of commercial industries over the past 50 years. From corporate logos and magazine mastheads to Swiss Army watch dials, movie titles, advertising, and record album covers, Huerta’s distinctive style has shaped visual culture.

Join us as we explore his creative process, from initial sketches to final inkings and color artwork. You’ll also gain insight into the evolution to digital tools and how this technological shift has transformed his approach to lettering and design.

Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.

Presented by the Letterform Archive.

Welcome to From the Bench, SFCB's series of short studio visits with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.

This month we'll chat with Rae Lanzerotti, a disabled access artist and maker of memoir comics and zines based in San Francisco.

Rae Lanzerotti uses disability access tools to make touchable, audible, and graphic memoir comics, zines, and art books. They have shown multimodal pieces locally at the Museum of Craft and Design and the gallery of Ruth’s Table. Rae's memoir comic, “Embodied,” at the forefront of innovating accessible comics, will be featured in the display ‘Zines Forever: DIY Publications and Disability Justice (Wellcome Collection, London UK, March - Sept 2025).

As a 2025 “Hearts in San Francisco” artist, Rae’s heart is always here. You can find out more at their website, rlanzerotti.com.

Please visit our Vimeo page to see our past tours, previously known as Shelter in Studio.

March 6th, 2025
12:30 PM

Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time, two hours before the start time.

In the Studio: Devils Night! 

SFCB is pleased to invite all interested volunteers to a Devils Night of fun and cleaning in the print studio on Tuesday, February 4th from 5-8pm. Bring some grubby clothes and good stories to swap as we dig through our cases and galleys to get a bit dirty while helping to make the studio a bit cleaner.

Rediscover the bold, geometric letterforms that defined an era of Italian design.

For many years, Luca Lattuga of Anonima Impressori has been collecting and cataloguing modernist wood type (and some metal type) produced in Italy, which were very popular in the 1930s. Alongside Nebiolo’s bestsellers such as Neon, Italy saw the emergence of a plethora of original wood type designs. Often created by amateurs rather than professional type designers, these typefaces followed the European trend towards geometric lettering and can be seen as a local expression of vernacular typography.

Known today as “rationalist” typefaces (since the term “modernist” has never found favor among Italian critics and historians), they were widely used in advertisements, leaflets, posters, as well as on title pages, book covers, and magazine mastheads. While the Fascist regime promoted geometric letterforms — cunningly adopting the most advanced Art Deco trends in architecture and graphics — these typefaces enjoyed popularity across all levels of Italian society. They were not perceived as symbols of the regime and remained in use well into the 1960s.

Luca will present his findings in a book to be published by Lazy Dog Press in 2026. To support his research into these forgotten types, CAST has created digital revivals of the best designs Luca has uncovered. These revivals, released as Alfabeti Modernisti, are now available as part of CAST’s typeface collection and can also be accessed on Adobe Fonts. The collection was designed by a team of CAST members and collaborators, following a faithful and respectful approach to the original sources.

Three members of CAST will introduce the collection and present their revival work, focusing on the small changes that have been made to the original design in order to produce digital fonts that meet the expectations of contemporary users.

Letterform Lectures are a public aspect of the Type West postgraduate program. The series is co-presented by the San Francisco Public Library, where events are free and open to all.

Join author, artist, and educator Julie Beeler and book designer Wynne Au-Yeung for an engaging discussion about their collaboration on the bestselling book The Mushroom Color Atlas. This evening event will feature a captivating slideshow presentation and an informal conversation, offering attendees a behind-the-scenes look at the book design process—from initial concepts to the finished product—and the discoveries and creative decisions that brought the project to life.

SFCB will have copies of this book for sale during the event, and in our online Biblioshop.

Friday, February 27, 2025

Doors will open at 6:00 pm; the event will start promptly at 6:30 pm.

Welcome to From the Bench, SFCB's series of short studio visits with friends near and far. From favorite tools to works in progress, you never know what you'll learn about from these amazing artists.

This month we'll chat with Gino Robair, a papermaker, printer, composer, and percussionist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Gino Robair’s artistic practice examines how systems of human interaction are influenced by perceptions of materiality. His PhD research at the UC Davis focuses on papermaking and letterpress printing as forms of embodied choreography; a performative process that puts artists in conversation with their tools, materials, and ambient environment. The results of this interaction are ephemeral memory-objects carrying traces of their materialization that can be used as resources for interpretation within a performance context. 

You can find out more at his website.

Please visit our Vimeo page to see past recordings, previously known as Shelter in Studio.

Registration will close at noon on the day of the event. The zoom link will be emailed at 10:30am Pacific time, two hours before the start time.