A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure

Showcasing a collection of innovative typeface designs alongside the stories of the countercultural queer figures who inspired them

Published with Library Stack.

This volume, A Queer Year of Love Letters, expands upon the eponymous series of openly downloadable typeface fonts by New York–based designer and alphabet artist Nat Pyper. The letterforms in this collection are each derived from the life stories, printed ephemera and vernacular scripts of a selection of countercultural queer figures, collectives and publications from recent decades. These include Robert Ford of THING magazine, the Chinese American painter Martin Wong, the Third World Gay Revolution collective and the Women's Car Repair Collective, among others. The book showcases the biographies of these figures alongside previously unseen archival materials, as well as digital craft methodology for Pyper’s designs inspired by them. Connecting font design to queer culture, this project comes at a critical time of increasing erasure and suppression of trans and queer histories.
RISD design professor Paul Soulellis writes in his essay "What Is Queer Typography?," "there is no queer typography, only queer acts of reading and writing." This book proposes a kind of compendium for that concept.
In addition to a new essay from Soulellis, the book features contributions from Silas Munro, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Claire Finch and others. Their essays offer emerging perspectives on queer archival practices, DIY lineages, design and politics, and love as the basis for research. This project challenges the field of graphic design―a field of signs, representations and meaning-making―to extend toward undervalued perspectives and overlooked pockets of visual and semiotic history.