Lester's Lettering

A short film of Seb Lester featuring his skilled and steady handlettering work. He just released two new limited-edition prints based on the poetry of Dylan Thomas and a quote from William Shakespeare.

New prints of Lester's stunning lettering work. More images can be seen here. Both prints are for sale, but in limited runs. Below are some found shopping lists with Lester's lettering which make me hungry for more. 

Me too!
HT to Colourworks!

Thirst For Words

Got a thirst for words? This typewriter has some type on tap. The designer, known simply as Morskoiboy, schemed up the idea of a cocktail typewriter one day, drew up a sketch, and within months, had a cocktail-dispensing typewriter contraption built of plexiglas, plastic piping, pumps and pushbutton letters. Type any letter and a colored liquid will display it and dispense it. Type more letters and you have yourself a word cocktail. Caution: drink words sparingly. Too many and you forget how to use them. Unless...Morskoiboy can maybe invent some sort of a liquid white-out solution that might erase the colored letters after drinking them...Hmmm

Morskoiboy's cocktail typewriter works simply by mixing a base liquid in the basin at top— such as water, milk, or alcohol—with the corresponding colored liquids from the vessels below. Pressing the letters on the keyboard injects the corresponding colored liquids into a splitter, sending it to the various segments of the letter display. Each letter activates a syringe with a valve that converts them into a pump. Push L for lime, K for kahlua, O for orange, V for vodka. After the splitter injects the liquid into as many segments needed to display the particular letter, it then mixes it with the base liquid before it reaches the tap. The biggest decision you will have to make as the typist/bartender is how many words per cocktail to type.   
     Morskoiboy reports that his typewriter is not quite ready-for-prime-time (I'd call that a prototypewriter), and still needs some fine-tuning. Perhaps he can build the next one with an optional set of lowercase letters for the youth crowd. Oh, and a snowflake glyph for ice.

Ewww, I'm not about to drink any flourescent pink R. That just can't be a real food product ;(

That Readin' Stuff is Out of Sight

Before he was God or Nelson Mandela, Morgan Freeman played the hipster, Easy Reader on the children's TV show, The Electric Company in the seventies. Alongside him here was actress Rita Moreno playing Carmelita. Uh, uh, uhhh!

::A shout out to Book Patrol where Easy Reader is featured on Book Patrol TV, episode 4. 

Living Letters

"Blümerant", a temporary public event staged in Berlin's Gendarmenmarkt in 2007, was designed by the art group, msk7 in an effort to stimulate communication. The group of 7 women artists transformed a large public square into a walk-in crossword puzzle. The enormous letters, made of mats of sedum, grass, lichens and moss vegetation, comprised words absorbed into local Berlin slang from the French Huguenots who immigrated to the area 300 years earlier. I can't speak about the actual outcomes of this crossword event or if the puzzle was physically completed, but I imagine the first sight of all the giant living letters must have been puzzling for many. My first reaction was...do they need weeding? And where are these letters living now?

Words of Mystery

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "every word was once a poem", but where do these words come from? Independent filmmaker Jessica Oreck unfolds some of the etymological meaning of words in her new animated mini-series, Mysteries of Vernacular. Each word is skillfully constructed within the pages of old books, then animated in a 90 second short, often taking 80 hours or more to create. When complete, the Mysteries' shorts will contain 26 installments of word origins in alphabetical order. By day, Oreck produces documentary films on such topics as Russian folktales against a backdrop of war in The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, and Arctic Cowboys, about reindeer herders in Finnish Lapland. The Mysteries mini-series began as a fun exercise in more immediate gratification, in contrast to these lengthy documentaries. To date she has completed three shorts, for the words Clue, and Pants, and Assassin, however three more word stories are said to be in the wings and should be posted soon.

::Via A Little House in the Clouds

The Remains of the Day

Collage artist, Cecil Touchon makes nice use of the residue of printed materials, books and text in his minimalist Fusion Series. These are quite different from his visual poetry series of Post-Dogmatist paintings and collages below. I rather like the works above, but maybe this says more about my fear of large deconstructed letterforms. I can't help wanting to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

The Silence Experiment

The difficulty of learning any new language is learning pronunciation. With all of the excessive silent letters, it is no easy task to wrangle words into sentences. In the English language, one can fairly admit there are a surplus of vowels that are wallflowers of a sort. They are present but seldom accounted for unless you are in a spelling bee. 

Well now, someone has visually demonstrated all of the matter that these silent but surplus letters visually make when printed in three different languages. In the project Silenc, developed for a recent Data Visualization course at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, students Manas Karambelkar, Momo Miyazaki and Kenneth A. Robertsen took on this challenge. They present a visual display of an interpretation of silent letters within Danish, English and French, and it is based upon the concept of find-and-replace. A database is constructed from hundreds of rules and exceptions, and an open source processing code then marks up the silent letters.

To visualize the collected data, it is displayed in different methods. In a graphic display, a common text written in 3 languages is created using the same fonts and style. All of the silent letters are then assembled at the bottom of the page as a measure of their enormity. In the book, the silent letters are all in red, and when viewing this with a red-filtered 3D lens, these letters disappear entirely. The results of these demonstrations are compelling. Just think of all the space, paper and ink we would save, by not printing or reading all of these surplus letters. Less is always more. 

Words With Friends in 19th C England

These two Victorian word wheels, c.1870, found in a Ken Spelman Rare Books catalog from August 2010, are described as "two 10-inch star-shaped cut-outs, each handwritten (on both sides) with a wide variety of slogans relating to love and fortune". The strings would have been held and spun in some fashion, creating a fortune-telling game most likely. No doubt a popular pastime in Victorian times, but certainly no match for Words With Friends. 

Faux Snow Job

It snowed outside today and blanketed the city in white for the first time this Winter. Just in time to share some very recent snowflake work from a few of my Experimental Typography students. I know it may seem contrary, but I had them each design snowflakes as a warm-up exercise on the first day of class two weeks ago. Actually, I call them "word crystals". I assign students to design three snowflake-like crystals from a list of words about winter, snow and ice. They must use just one word and one font per flake, and are asked to work quickly and be playful with each. Just as the single word requires the students to look closely at the shape and the structure of it very carefully, the word alone is also responsible for creating the structure of the snowflake once a repeat pattern is defined. Most were symmetrical, but not all, and I continue to be pleasantly surprised by their varied outcomes.
      The three snowflakes in the top row are designed by Sarah Ervine. Words used in each (from left to right) are Glacier; Avalanche; and Blizzard. Second row from left is Marisa Tanji: Chilling; Sarah Rudback: Silence; Jeremy Grant: Glacier. Third row is Jeremy Grant: Winter; Sarah Rudback: Exquisite; Marisa Tanji: Sledding.

The three feather-like dendrites above are designed by Susan Schumacher. Each were created in Photoshop using the three words, Silence, Snowangel, and Snowbird. Reversed out of black, they would more closely resemble a starburst of fireworks because of the beautiful contrail of letters she created. Such fine flakes have greater detail to reveal, so please click away on all.
      Although Brendan Lattin's work below is more like a snowstorm than a snowflake, it is a beautiful texture none-the-less. We will soon be doing more experiments with lettering, texture and typographical patterns so I hope to be sharing more of my student's work here in the near future.

Beyond Words

I realize this video project from Facebook's Creative Director Ji Lee is making the rounds everywhere, but yes, it is that good. You can see the stills of his visual puns at his website, Please enjoy. Or, get the print edition. This time the book is just as good as the film.
:: Thanks Nici!

Moss Poetry

After the previous fern post below, I can't think of a better segue than moss lettering. This enviromental graffiti is the handwork of Anna Garforth who plants poetry around the urban landscape of London. The final artwork below is to spell out Grow beyond what you know with each word planted in a different location.

:: Photos above Via Crosshatchling and BumBumBum. The Photo below via Webponce.