The fellowship
Since 1990, the Herb Lubalin Study Center has awarded the Rhoda Lubalin Fellowship to senior graphic design students at The Cooper Union. The Study Center is itself an archive, yet three decades of fellowship projects had no archive of its own.
An artist and educator herself, Rhoda understood the transformative power of creative support. We are proud to continue her tradition of investing in the next generation of designers by providing mentorship, funding, and collection access. The Herb Lubalin Study Center
The archive
fellowship.lubalin.center catalogs every fellowship project since 1990: websites, zines, performances, podcasts. One page per year, every fellow credited. Grilli Type provided the fonts. The whole archive is set in GT Flexa; the landing logo above is interactive and uses variable fonts.
The Study Center adds new fellows every year, so I built the archivists a CMS: sign in and every year is editable (heroes, writeups, media, press links, proposal PDFs). They publish new fellowships without touching code.
The entries
One entry in full: Type High (2016), Michael Prisco and Helen Sywalski's exhibition of monumental letterforms. It won a Graphis Gold Medal and drew coverage in Core77 and AIGA Eye on Design. It is the most media-rich entry in the archive.
Projects awarded are serious undertakings that make a lasting contribution visually, theoretically, or historically to the collection. From the archive's FAQ
Each year starts with a different hero:
Everything you see is skewed. Our eyes make sure of it. What happens if we turn those blind spots into insights? Calil Arguedas-Russell, Shifting Weights, 2020
User journeys
Visitors start at the index: every year in one scroll, and tapping a row opens that project. On a year page, arrows open the previous or next fellowship and a dropdown selects any year, so moving between projects takes one tap. This is especially convenient on mobile. Every page loads instantly because SvelteKit renders it on the server.
How it's built
| Layer | Choice |
|---|---|
| Web app | SvelteKit, deployed on Vercel |
| Motion | CSS animations, with some GSAP |
| Content | Firebase Realtime Database |
| Media | Firebase Storage |
| Type | GT Flexa variable fonts, provided by Grilli Type |
| CMS | Custom in-app editor; Firebase Authentication limits writes to the archivists |
Responsive, cross form factor
Navigation collapses into a hamburger menu on mobile, title blocks stack, media moves to one column, photography stays full width. Below are both at once. The desktop page scrolls on the left; the right side shows a phone.
The archive is live at fellowship.lubalin.center.