Architectural Characters

The Veenman Printer building in Ede, Netherlands designed by Neutelings Riedijk. The facade wraps around the building to form a striking display of text. It is made of serigraphed glass and has a text by Dutch poet K. Schippers in a layout designed by Karel Martens. 

The "alphabet building" by MVRDV in Amsterdam. It is intended for small to mid-size creative agencies who have trouble finding suitable office space. 
:: Images from MVRDV via Designboom  

Helvetica eHouse at the beach by 3D designer Chris LaBrooy.

The Number house 2 designed by Japanese architect Matsunami Mitsutomo.

Urban renewal housing project.

New Jersey Performing Arts Center received a typographic makeover. Designed by Paula Scher of New York's Pentagram. Below is a parking garage structure also designed by Scher. 

The Lentos Art Museum in Linz, Austria designed by Weber & Hofer in Zurich. It has a transparent glass casing covered in a pattern of words (lentoskunstmuseum) which has the enormously scaled "Lentos" reversed out of the this text. At night it is brilliantly lit with colored lights which makes a beautiful setting on the Danube River. 

The Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel in Vancouver, BC. The lowercase text that wraps around each level of the building reads, "lying on top of a building, the clouds looked no nearer than when I was lying in the street". Text designed by British artist Liam Gillick. 
:: Via Weburbanist

The Minnaert Building designed by Neutelings Riedijk for Utrecht University has the word "Minneart" spelled out as structural support columns.
:: Images from ArchiTravel via Weburbanist.

The Wales Millennium Center, a performing arts center in Cardiff. The statement "In These Stones, Horizons Sing" written in Welsh and English, boldly graces the front entrance of the building.
:: Via Weburbanist

Typographic architecture designs by Chris LaBrooy based on the architecture of Tadao Ando. Each letter is styled after some of LaBrooy's favorite building designs.
:: Via LaBrooy's Flickrstream

This temporary structure was designed for the Korean Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 by the Korean architectural firm Mass Studies. It is an amalgamation of Korean written language and signage. The exterior of the building is clad in pixels of the Korean alphabet, Han-geul, creating an overall sign, or a text message. The pixels are white panels with many relief letters, all in four different sizes. Most of the interior surfaces are composed of about 40,000 colorful art pixels. These 2 images don't nearly do the building justice. Check out more images of this spectacular structure at Design Envy and see a full-blown animation at Mass Studies. Simply remarkable!
:: Via Poketo

Russian text-laden building.
:: Via Jordan Lloyd

The Domino House. Wish I knew more about this photo. 
It really is a scream!
:: Via Hollyhocks and Tulips 

Austrian postage stamp circa 1959. 
:: Via Karen Horton

Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Spooky Free Fonts: Be Very Aware!

Wild Wood a true type font from Jessica Slater of Jester Font Studio via Font Space.

Mars Attacks! A true type font from Jens R. Ziehn of Filmhimmel via Dafont.

You Murderer from 1001 Free Fonts.

Feast of Flesh A true type font from Nate Piekos of BlamBot from Dafont.

Zombified a true type font from Chad Savage of Sinister Visions via Dafont.
:: and many more via Hongkiat

Text Appeal

Readers, writers, typographers, and printers take note. The 6th annual Text Ball—the lettered stepchild of Portland, Oregon's annual literary Wordstock Festival—will take place on October 1st at p:ear Gallery. The theme this year is In Poetic Fashion and it is a benefit for the non-profit Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland which promotes literacy through DIY publishing. There will be live music by indie-folk heroine Laura Gibson and poetry readings, word games, giant crossword puzzles, dirty limerick challenges, a silent auction and more, including a parade of well-lettered fashions and prizes for the text-dressed. Come dressed as your favorite poem, book, letter, story, or word, enjoy the letterati and support a great cause. Advance tickets for $12 can be purchased here or $15 at the door.
      The photo above is last year's grand prize winner for Best Text, Erica Hijazi. She constructed a fashionable bow from a 1939 Williamette College newpaper she unearthed while picking up a VCR purchased on Craigslist. Soooo Portlandia! Her date wore a tie constructed from the same newspaper.

Mark Anen came dressed as a Government G-Man.

Aimee Pedretti's vision of Hell was Dante's Inferno.

Runner-up for Most Literary is writer and author Myrlin Hermes, featuring the entire text of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129: "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action..."
::All photos from the last year's text-dressed are taken by Georgia Perry.

Russian Storybook Redux

Last month I reported upon two beautifully illustrated Russian childrens' books and had lamented that I was unable to read either of them. A kind reader forewarded an excellent English translation onto me today of the first book, and a brief of the second book. The first book is actually a children's art book published in 1971, and is titled Drawing By Lines, by Russian poet S. Porgorelovskyi. The translated text is provided in or near each spread below, and as always, images are clickable. Thank you Volkov Evgeny! I didn't think it was possible to love this book more, until now.
      The second book which you can find in my original post is titled Choose Any Horse, and it is about two children who ride the the world over to see if there is a horse better than their own. They meet a clay horse, a gingerbread horse, wooden and paper horses, and a very good horse in a capital city. In the end, they decide that their horses are the best, because they are their's alone.

Alphabetical Wonders

In Bologna, Italy in 1839, decorative artist Antonio Basoli published a fantastic set of lithographs for his book, Alfabeto Pittorico (Pictorial Alphabet, or a collection of pictorial thoughts composed of objects beginning with the individual letters of the alphabet). His elaborate architectural drawings of twenty-four letters of the alphabet and one ampersand (sorry J & W), became later known as Basoli's Alphabet. View all of them in this video below.

Basoli wasn't the first and only to propose this idea of architectural alphabets. In 1773, Johann David Steingruber published his book of palatial plans, Architectonisches Alphabeth, where he designed grand construction plans based on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. To learn more, read Giornale Nuovo's post on Steingruber's alphabetical wonders, which is fortunately, still on life support. You can also read his dispatch on Basoli's Alphabet here.