01 — The Collective
A community for every archivist, not an association.
LAAC started in 2014, when a few of us — archivists who describe other people's collections for a living — decided the field needed its own advocacy, training and mutual aid in Los Angeles. I co-founded it and took on everything with a visual.
The brief I set myself was inclusion. Early in my own career I kept coming back to the Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable — whose voices get amplified in the field, and whose records make it into the archive at all. The brand had to hold that open, and the money couldn't be a gate: no budget, no staff, a board that rotates, members with day jobs elsewhere.
02 — The System
A folder, drawn open.
The mark is the file folder — the object the whole field is organized around — drawn as a stack of tabs with the name set inside. It's left open on purpose: the folder any archivist can put something into. Around it, an icon language in one line weight — bone folder, film reel, loupe-glasses, a foam finger reading you are here, a palm, an open book spelling LA — archival vocabulary and Los Angeles in the same hand.
laacollective.org runs the whole kit at wall scale behind one line, Archivists of Los Angeles unite. Any committee can pull from it and stay on brand without a designer in the room.
- — Folder mark · circular seal · wordmark, est. 2014
- — Apercu Bold / Medium over Lora
- — Palette named for the job: Hollinger, File, Foxing, Film Negative, Pen
Icons in one line weight, a palette named for what an archivist handles, and a serif-over-sans pairing that reads as calm as a finding aid.
Hollinger
File
Foxing
Film Neg.
Pen
Apercu Bold · Medium · Light
Lora Bold · Italic
One identity feeding the things a volunteer org usually can't sustain: a magazine on a real schedule, an annual conference, a decade of event graphics, and a shop that pays for some of it.
Acid Free, the magazine
I pitched it to replace a blog nobody could keep up. It launched quarterly in 2015 and went biannual at issue ten. Thirteen issues in, the system is the shell — each one gets its own type and a commissioned illustrator.
One issue, start to finish
The Occult issue: art direction, layout, the web build, and the commission brief for the cover — here, Sun Ra by Niv Bavarsky.
ArchivesNOW
Identity for LAAC's yearly conference with UCLA. The marbled blues are lifted from the endpapers of an acid-free book — the thing the magazine is named after.
The shop
Merch as in-joke. Respect des fonds, the archival principle, becomes respect des fronds over a palm. “Queen of the DAM.” “Finding Aid.” Only archivists laugh, which is the whole idea.
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Issues of Acid Free designed and art-directed
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One visual system, no rebrand — 2014 to 2022
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Volunteer-built, top to bottom
Years after I handed it off, LAAC still runs on the folder-tab logo and the icon set — drawn once, in 2014, to outlast whoever's holding the file next.
