Online Letterform Archive [web app][prototyping][user research][cultural]

The Letterform Archive houses one of the world's most significant collections of typography, lettering, and graphic design. The Online Archive brings that collection to the web, making it searchable, zoomable, and accessible to anyone — built for the way designers actually browse.

Impact:102K active users · 3M+ page views · 4 min avg. engagement time

Role:Product Design, Design Engineer, Prototyping, User Research

Collaborators:Jon Sueda (Graphic Designer), Chris Hamamoto (Designer/Developer), Amelia Grounds (Librarian), Stephen Coles (Associate Curator & Editorial Director), Kate Long Stellar (Collections Director), Murray Grigo-McMahon (Data Engineer)

Links: oa.letterformarchive.org , letterformarchive.org , letterformarchive.org

Why

Most digital archives flatten everything into uniform grids — the physicality of objects, their scale, weight, and texture, gets lost. Browsing feels like searching, and discovery disappears.

How

A discovery tool where thumbnails are sized proportionally to real-world dimensions, filtering encourages lateral exploration, and high-fidelity imaging lets users zoom into the grain of the paper.

Impact

102K active users · 3M+ page views · 4 min avg. engagement time

I started with research — surveying designers to understand how they actually browse, filter, and discover in a graphic design collection.

User research survey results showing how designers self-identify, what filters they'd find useful, and a key insight: "More often I'm looking to browse, and an immediate search bar experience makes browsing hard."
User research survey results showing how designers self-identify, what filters they'd find useful, and a key insight: "More often I'm looking to browse, and an immediate search bar experience makes browsing hard."

I worked through the collection layout collaboratively — grouping objects, testing scale relationships, and prototyping how items should be presented together.

Collaborative design workshop board showing grouped arrangements of books, posters, and archival objects with sticky note annotations, used to explore how items should be organized, scaled, and presented in the collection grid.
Collaborative design workshop board showing grouped arrangements of books, posters, and archival objects with sticky note annotations, used to explore how items should be organized, scaled, and presented in the collection grid.

The Online Letterform Archive reached 102K active users, 3M+ page views, and a 4-minute average engagement time — numbers that rarely show up for a digital archive.