Animation by Katrīna Sadovņikova

For her graduation project at the Art Academy of Latvia, graphic designer Alisa Milyukhina focused on the Latvian typographic heritage, compiling the most interesting and significant finds in the book 100 Latvian Letters. The second edition of the book has now been published by Valters Dakša. In the Nice Touch section, Alisa shares an online collection of a wide range of freely usable visual materials.

Nice Touch Editorial November 3, 2023

«I love antiques, flea markets, second-hand books, antique shops, and things like that. Of course, the internet is full of archives too. Our own National Library of Latvia has a wonderful resource called Periodika.lv, where you can go down a rabbit hole, but this time I want to tell you about another library’s archive.

The British Library is very generous with sharing various visuals on their Flickr account. There are over a million images there, all of them under a Creative Commons licence, which means that you can use them all for your own projects. The collection includes illustrations from children’s books, maps, various engravings, and drawings organised by themes. I think it is very important that all the images are credited with their source — when and where the material was created, who the author is, etc. This is very important when doing research. That’s what differentiates this archive from Pinterest or Instagram, where you can also find beautiful collections of images, but sometimes the sources are not mentioned at all.»

Alisa Milyukhina currently works as a graphic designer for the independent media Meduza. You can follow Alisa’s creative work on her website and Instagram account. Read more about the book 100 Latvian Letters here. The British Library Flickr account is available here.