About HistoricType

Our Mission Statement

1. Create an online, free access resource for students, professionals, and scholars studying letters and typography on historic signs, broadsides, and buildings.


2. Encourage and promote research and writing on related topics by students, professionals, and scholars.
   
   

Our Image Database: August 2008

Create, manage, and archive a database of images of letterforms and type in the context of historical signs, broadsides, and buildings.

Objectives:

• Provide researchers with a central hub—a place to start their search.
• Fill a void. No organized database of images of historic type in context of signs, broadsides, and buildings exists. (Type history tends to focus on printed materials.) Images of lettering and type in this context tend to be available through personal collections or buried in collections dedicated to other things.
• Contextualize images in terms of place, date (of sign, not of image), materials, type style, etc. This will enable researchers to search through the database for specific examples of lettering and type. (Images currently available thru Flickr or other personal collections are rarely identified more specifically than “cool ghost sign, Anywhere, USA,.” In museum collections, the keyword “sign” might show up in the description of catalog number 009-03.987)
• Archive the collection, so it remains available.
• Draw on a community of type/signage enthusiasts and scholars to identify images and/or add information to images if any key terms are noted as “unknown” when posted to the database.

Our Online Journal: FALL 2008

Create, manage, and archive a database of reviewed essays, interviews, memoirs, book reviews, etc., on topics related to lettering and type from historic signs, broadsides, and buildings. Topics may include, but are not limited to: materials, methods, cultural significance, type history, advertising, historical context, preservation, and architecture.

Objectives:

• Further contextualize the images by positioning them within writing on the topic. (When a visitor searches using keywords such as “stone” and “1880s” any writing containing those keywords will also be returned in the search results.)


• Encourage thoughtful writing in the field by students, design professionals and scholars by giving them a place to publish on the topic.


• Mentor students and design professionals who do not have experience submitting a piece of writing for publication. A section of the journal will be dedicated to tips on how to prepare writing for submission, how to self-edit, etc. Topic-appropriate, unaccepted submissions will be returned to author with feedback (guidelines for improvement) and the opportunity to re-submit.

Editorial Board

Laura Franz, Editor/Managing Editor
Connie Grab, Graduate Assistant 2007-2008
Mark Maxwell, Graduate Assistant 2008-2009

We are currently in the process of building an editorial board who will:
Work with authors, each editing/mentoring no more than 4 submissions per year;
Work with the Managing Editor, forwarding finalized submissions, images, etc.;
Work with the Editor to plan any special topics issues and identify possible
people to serve on the Editorial Board for that issue;
If interested, write for/contribute to the journal periodically.

Technical Development and Support

Randy Apuzzo, Jetscram Design

Help update tags!

Calling all type, history, and signage enthusiasts: help us update our image database by identifying and updating unknown tags.

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