November 9, 2024 – April 4, 2025

Help Us Map Chicago’s Letterforms!

We’re excited to see the unique letterforms you’ve discovered around the city. By sharing your photos, you’ll help us build a map that showcases Chicago’s rich typographic landscape, from bold storefront signs to intricate graffiti tags and classic posters.

Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types explores typography, the shape and design of letters, within Chicago's diverse neighborhoods to investigate design legacies and their contemporary echos. The exhibition highlights alternative modernisms by considering how revolutionary movements and concepts like love and safety shape the way communities spread and design information for one another.

Featured designers and lettering artists activate the Design Museum of Chicago with objects, stories, demonstrations, and workshops that engage with the physicality of the art of typography. The exhibition includes printed materials and cultural ephemera, tools of typographic design like moveable type and sign painters’ brushes, and contemporary typographic work from designers, graffiti writers, and participants in community-based research and development programs. Moving beyond the four walls of the museum, exhibitions and programs prioritize the voices of the communities represented in the work by presenting it in community spaces local to them.

Letters Beyond Form provides a deeper understanding of the role of letterforms and their makers in creating meaning, and explores how design serves different communities through an affirmation of identity- and care-based relationships.

Exhibition Typefaces & Specimens

Letters Beyond Form includes four typefaces designed by students at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Design. The fonts and type specimens were developed in collaboration with students and faculty, with each design direction led by one student.

Letters Beyond Form is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities. This project is funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.