For designers, collecting materials for typographic examination and inspiration is a common part of the type design process. However, the act of organizing such materials provides an opportunity to discover new ways of engaging in typography by identifying patterns and avenues of opportunity the emerge from a large set of data.
Drawing upon lessons learned from the Chinese Type Archive, an open, collaborative index of Chinese typographic resources that launched in early 2020, Synoptic Office principals Caspar Lam and YuJune Park will explore the practical challenges of cataloging material as well as the creation of metadata—data that describes other data—that aid in the construction of databases but also reveal complex ways in which we think about typography. Here, we will see that the ways we digitally organize our typographic materials have effects on the way we capture history and ultimately talk about typography.