Professional Resources

A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers, published by AIGA and NAGO

Archiving brochure thumbnail AIGA strives to meet professional standards in our quest to document the history of AIGA’s role in a dynamically adapting profession as well as sharing standards that our member designers should use in protecting their own history.

To demonstrate this, AIGA worked with the Dutch Archives for Graphic Designers (NAGO) in the Netherlands to publish an English version of A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers. The guide provides designers with the proper ways to store and describe their collections in 10 short chapters. The author, Karin van der Heiden, provided the translation.

Ten tips for designers to avoid an archiving disaster:

  1. Do not keep everything. Archiving is identifying.
  2. Keep the process, not only the final result.
  3. Keep items that belong together, together. Archiving is organizing.
  4. Describe what you have and where you have it stored.
  5. Keep your archive in a safe place—high and dry.
  6. Remove the enemies.
  7. Protect your archive from mold, animals and bugs.
  8. Safely house your archives in suitable boxes, files, folders or tubes.
  9. Think about digital durability.
  10. Keep old technology and equipment.

A Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers is a publication from NAGO, a foundation that seeks to collect, preserve and provide digital access to the archives of prominent Dutch designers. The archives are published on the NAGO website.

About the author:

Art historian Karin van der Heiden has been in charge of the Dutch Archives for Graphic Designers (NAGO) in the Netherlands for more than nine years. She was responsible for the digitization of the work of various Dutch designers and studios. She moderates discourses, gives workshops and lectures on design history and design archives at universities, colleges and conferences. In 2006, she published the Concise Guide to Archiving for Designers, a comprehensive manual on how to preserve and organize designers’ archives. Currently, she consults archival institutes, museums and design bureaus on collection accessibility and digitization. She also develops new projects with her own company, PARKC.