Craig Eliason's current research focuses on the history of hand-lettering, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is exploring a number of historical occasions for letters created by hand, including embroidered cross-stitch samplers, labels on maps and architectural drawings, new pens and alphabets of the period, department-store showcard signage, and titles in early cinema. He is especially interested in what norms arose for letterforms in these various fields, how they responded to particular circumstances of those fields, and how they related to each other and to the standards of typography. This research follows a couple of decades of research on the history of printing types, with particular interest in the early 20th-century Auriol type family, so called "modern-face" types, and the labels used to classify printing types in the modern period. His scholarly interests in type history and his practice as a digital type designer mutually inform each other. His earlier research investigated the theoretical and practical relationships between the Dada and Constructivist movements in the 1920's, particularly in the career of Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg.
