About HistoricType
Our Mission Statement
- Create an online, free access resource for students, professionals, and scholars studying letters and typography on historic signs, broadsides, and buildings.
- Encourage and promote research and writing on related topics by students, professionals, and scholars.
Our Image Database: August 2009
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.
Editorial Board
Laura Franz, Editor/Managing Editor
Anna Dempsey, Operations Consultant
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