Send us your work
The archive is better when the people who made the thing are the ones handing it over. Here is what we do with it, and what we will not do with it.
Almost everything in this archive comes from a museum, a library or a commons. The rights are clean and the pictures are good, but the account is second-hand: we are reading a finished object and reconstructing the decisions behind it. Work sent in by the people who made it is the opposite. Permission is explicit, the credit is first-hand, and the constraints (the budget, the print run, the thing the client would not allow) are known rather than guessed at.
So this form is open to studios, to designers working alone, to printers, letterers, photographers and the person who did the whole thing themselves at two in the morning. Old work is welcome. Small work is welcome. A single matchbox label is as interesting here as a national airline.
What we do with it
We write it ourselves.
You send the work and the facts. The description, the argument and the headline are ours, the way they are for everything else here. It is the only way the library reads as one voice rather than as a wall of press releases.
We credit everyone named on it.
Studio, designer, photographer, printer, client. Every name links onward, so a credit is never a dead end.
We show the source and the licence.
On the page, next to the picture, like every other plate. Work sent in is filed as submitted by the studio, which means the images stay here and are not offered for download.
We email you when it goes live.
Once, on the day, to the address on the form. That is the whole of the mailing that comes out of a submission.
What we will not do
We will not publish it just because you sent it.
Most of what comes in will not go up. That is a judgement about whether it sits next to the other things here, not a verdict on the work.
We will not pretend to be neutral.
An entry that refuses to judge is a folder listing. If we publish yours we will say what it does well and what it does not, and you will read that before anyone else does, but you do not get to edit it.
We will not host font files.
If the work is a typeface we will show it set, at size, and point at where to license it. The files stay with you.
We will not generate imagery in your style.
Nothing in this library is fed to an image model. Learn is written and photographed; the studio next door works from a brand's own material, with that brand's permission, and never from someone else's work.
And if you change your mind after it is up, tell us and it comes down the same day. The whole rights position, including the log of where every image here came from, is on the rights page.
The form
Three things decide whether an entry can exist at all: an address to answer, a description of the work, and somebody with the standing to give permission. Those are the required fields. The rest helps and can be left empty.