Why

Most digital archives flatten everything into uniform grids so that the physicality of objects, their scale, weight, and texture gets lost. Browsing these archives feel like searching, and the joy of discovery disappears.

How

A discovery tool where filtering encourages exploration, objects are sized proportionally to real-world dimensions, and high-fidelity imaging allows for detailed visual research.

Impact

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

We began by surveying designers to understand how they actually browse, filter, and discover in a graphic design collection.

“More often I’m looking to browse, and an immediate search bar experience makes browsing hard.”

The research kept returning to one finding: designers don’t browse with a search query. They browse to wander. That single insight shaped every design decision that followed.

Rather than a search bar, we designed a filter system that rewards defining a combination of multiple categories to surface results no one thought to look for.

A key design decision came from the objects themselves. Objects are rendered at their true proportional dimensions, so that scale becomes a piece of the research process as well.

High-fidelity imaging shrinks the distance between the physical and digital. Utilizing the incredible high-res scans of the Letterform Archive, users can zoom into details that may not even present themselves with the object in hand.

The result is a digital experience that feels like browsing a well-curated flat file. Objects surface themselves through a wandering search every session, inviting the user to come across object they were never even looking for.