Educator Julie Spivey at the University of Georgia integrates archive-based learning into teaching typography

Designer and researcher Tanvi Sharma based in Brooklyn offers her favorite items from the Archive and a unique story about her family's collections.

See selections from The Archive in motion from the imaginative minds of design students.

The project teaches students about biases and factors that contribute to who and what has been included in graphic design history.

In my first year of teaching, I was assigned to teach Graphic Design History course. As a new professor fresh out of graduate school and with only a few years of professional practice before that, I relied on the traditional graphic design history texts.

Beginning this spring, designer educator Roshanak Keyghobadi began effortfully researching Iranian graphic design history and adding this material to The People’s Graphic Design Archive. Using our new Collections feature, she built collections that include Iranian Women in Graphic Design, Iranian Poster Design, and Iranian Typography. This interview shares her project and process and will hopefully inspire others to do original research on previously overlooked histories... and to create collections of their own.

Alan Marshall, known as the pseudonym typografix and a frequent contributor to The People’s Graphic Design Archive, shared his passion for the platform and shed light on his frequent contributions as an uploader. During our conversation, Alan provided valuable insights into some of his uploads to The Archive.

We got in touch with Leah Day in the Spring of 2022 on her thesis research on ‘Visualizing Archives’. Leah's findings and charts have been on our minds as The People’s Graphic Design Archive (PGDA) continues to expand on a more complete version of graphic design history. This piece summarizes Leah's research and is a great resource for others entering the digital design archive space.

Does it make sense to talk about justifying submissions to an archive as radically inclusive as The People’s Graphic Design Archive? Would asking us to explain our choices contradict PGDA’s deliberately messy democratic nature, where all posts are created equal?

At a time when democracies around the world are literally under siege, invoking such egalitarian ideals may seem grossly disproportionate—or worse, callously flip. It would be if it were not for the fact that an archive identified as the “People’s” unquestionably has politics. It follows that if we understand ‘politics’ as deciding how to make decisions for groups, then every upload is a decision made for the PGDA’s constituency.

Design journalist Andrea Yepes based in Envigado, Colombia offers her favorite items from the Archive and unique ideas about making design history.

It has been nearly six months since The People’s Graphic Design Archive’s (PGDA) permanent site launched. Since then, it has been exciting to watch PGDA contributors uploading work from an array of backgrounds and experiences.

Whether in commercial and academic circles, user contributions generate real value on the basic principle that “discoverability” is enhanced by adding tags to content. Still, some tags may be more useful than others and so here are a few thoughts on the process. A collection the size of the People’s Graphic Design Archive is just too large to look through in its entirety, especially if you are looking for specific materials. Tags serve to sort the mass of stuff into smaller groups. The application of individual knowledge is a gift to others.

I want to draw attention to archivist and curator Dorothy Berry’s passionate essay “The House That Archives Built.” In this writing, she unpacks her fraught relationship with institutional archives and with the professional discipline in which she was trained that can render Black cultural heritage invisible.

Two recent events have resulted in an expansion of unique, relevant new content for The Archive. Ramon Tejada, affable designer with a magic ability to encourage collaboration, hosted a virtual Latinx Add-a-thon in October for community members to upload new works. Ramon guided a vibrant conversation about Latinx design and history as users shared their passion projects and uploaded almost 50 new works.

In 2021, I was hired by George Mason University to redesign the Graphic Design History course to reflect the needs of our students and the world in which they now find themselves. Continuing the status quo was no longer an option. The students demanded more, expected more, and deserved more than a regurgitation of the same narratives and limited perspectives preserved in the single lone voice of a default textbook based on a stale historical canon.

Bobby Joe Smith III, Black and Lakota graphic designer, media artist, and educator living in Los Angeles drops insight on archives and shares a few favorites from The People’s Graphic Design Archive.

Packing up Margo Halverson's office at Maine College of Art & Design became a case study for organizing, documenting, and uploading large bodies of material to The People’s Graphic Design Archive (PGDA). She helped us figure out a process that was fast and easy!

For our first March in existence we featured and honored all women

In February, we featured all Black designers on our social media accounts, twitter, instagram, and facebook. As we were planning for our

WOW! That was pretty much my daily reaction when I started researching California’s contribution to graphic design