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On Typography: Alphabet Soup

JA August 05

It’s funny where aimless googling will take you these days. I was following the URL trail on the British Library’s recent purchase of a 16th century medieval alphabet book when I came across this article on a man who had made a giant typographical map of Paris out of linoleum. Various links in turn led me to this site, Creative Review, a London-based mag devoted to all things visual (ad campaigns, photography, digital media, illustration etc). But what really caught my eye was the blog, which in itself has several awesome profiles on typography-related ventures – from Barack Obama fonts to graffiti alphabets. Here’s a wee sample:

1. Rubik’s Cube Font Generator

Jas Bhachu from the Liverpool School of Art & Design has created a Rubik’s Cube with an actual purpose, and hopefully one that is much easier to solve. Despite the rather grand name, it’s really a Rubik’s Cube stamp – it works much the same way as the standard, only instead you shift the various compartments to create stamp faces, which in turn can be used to create letters.

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2. Tales in Type

Design studio Brighten the Corners has come up with two children’s books illustrated entirely from type, The illustrations of Victor & Susie and Stanley & Marvin are clever and deceptively simple – I particularly like the upside-down r’s for legs and feet, or the backwards G for a nose. Author Billy Kiossoglou explained that ‘the main idea was to stress the images and text equally, and play with the fact that they're both made out of the same 'ingredients', which are simply arranged and subsequently read differently. Children's books often treat text and images like they belong to altogether different worlds and we wanted to avoid that.’

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3. When Driving Becomes Writing

This may have been done by Toyota and its Belgian ad agency as part of one of those ‘let’s do a crazy stunt for publicity’ manoeuvres, but it’s worth looking at just the same. The iQ font was created by the rather cutely named Pleaseletmedesign and interactive artist Zachary Lieberman by tracking the movements of a car. There was some rather technical stuff done with coloured dots, an aerial camera and digital tracking (all of which is explained rather more coherently through the accompanying video) and the results are about as good as an episode of Top Gear.

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iQ font - When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.

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