In the spring of 2018, I was invited to tour the private scientific collections of the California Academy of Sciences as part of a typeface design collaboration. Situated in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the Academy is one of the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over forty-six million specimens. The Academy was established in 1853 as a learned society and still carries out a good deal of original research. Its goal for inviting a group of designers to tour its private collections was to provide inspiration for new typeface designs based on the field notes, labels, and books found in the archives. This was a win-win situation I couldn’t pass up: celebrating the typefaces inspired by the collections as well as the process of their creation introduces the Academy to a fresh, design-centric audience.