riting is a big part of our lives, it’s a means of communication, of learning and teaching, of telling or being told stories. And writing is art. The written form has a great power to move us and make an impression on how we perceive the world. Think, for example, of written text, advertising, warnings, notes you can see all around the city. I can’t walk past a written text without reading it. How about you?
The written word has call to action power and a very powerful impact, due to combined power of message understanding and visual memory. If we combine all this with typographic beauty, we have a rich and resourceful form of art. This week’s Sunday Special is all about that.
Home decor
From the Welcome doormat and the house number, to clocks, posters or a child’s name on a door, typography is slowly becoming the new trend in home decor. Wonderful Graffiti is a interior decoration company celebrating typography, the art of lettering, in unconventional ways. We’ve been taught, from early childhood, that writing on walls is bad. That we should use pen and paper and stop it at that. Wonderful Graffiti tries to change that and inspire people to express themselves and discover the endless possibilities of decorating one’s surrounding with writing. Just think how a blank wall can become personal and insightful, just by using paper, stencils, ink, markers, embroidery or whatever comes in hand to jot down favorite quotes, advice, recipes, inside jokes.
Photo credits for the mosaic on the left:
Surface Graphics on Artlook, Textorating on Apartment Therapy, Signature mugs on Design Sponge, Erosion and typography on Etsy
Other home decor resources:
Branding
When creating a brand, typography is as important as anything else. We sometimes recognize brands that we like or relate to only based on the type face they use. The mosaic on the left shows glimpses of some important fonts made famous by the brands they represent. You can see more of those on bashbosh.com, aext.net, and webexpedition18.com.
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In the same note, I would like to recommend a very nice reading on Woody Allen’s unique typographic style, white Windsor on black.
Beautiful online typographic projects
Noticed the nice drop cap at the beginning of the post? Well, I kept the secret until now, but no more. From the description of the website, we find out that the Daily Drop Cap is an ongoing project by typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische. Each day, a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap will be posted for your enjoyment and for the beautification of blog posts everywhere.
The mosaic on the right shows only two of the drop caps created by Jessica, together with ampersands cataloged daily on Ampersand and Ampersand, a blog celebrating the beauty of ampersand, each day, every day.
Like handmade? What about fonts? What about handmade fonts? An Estonia based design agency founded in 2008 specialized in designing unique, traditional fonts, inspired from everything that surrounds them. The fonts are complete and can be used in projects ranging from business cards to outdoor advertising.
Another cool tool, which I play with a lot, is Wordle, a project by Jonathan Feinberg, a great Java tool to turn your blog or website content into a beautiful “word clouds”.
The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
Typography resources
- I love typography – It’s just about impossible to imagine a world without type, but at the same time, type’s ubiquity has most of us taking it for granted. So take a closer look.
- typoGRAPHIC – an interactive experience informed by type and typography, aiming to illustrate the depth and import of type and to raise relevant questions about how typography is treated in the digital media, specifically online.
- Typographica – review of typefaces and type books, with occasional commentary on fonts and typographic design
- We love typography – an image, video and text bookmarking site that is wholly dedicated to type-related content
A little game
Can you guess all these movies from just these letters? 46 typography signs, 46 movies, one challenge. Go here to take the test and let me know if you can complete it. I will probably struggle until this time next week…
Have a great Sunday!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Anka I too LOVE fonts and typography and notice beautiful and shocking examples all the time.
This article I read got my interest this week. The subject line: Do typefaces really matter? – of course they do – I can’t beleive they even had to ask!!
Hope you’re well
Fiona xx
Hi, Fiona. Thanks for stopping by and for sharing this interesting article.
Here is also the link, as reference for future visitors
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10689931
Have a great Sunday!
Silly me!!! I forgot to include the link didnt I!!! Oops!