Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters by David Sacks
by Maria Popova
It’s no secret we’re obsessed with alphabet books. But a new book by David Sacks offers much more depth than the designerly eye candy the genre lends itself to.
Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters is an ambitious exploration of the pervasiveness of letters in everyday life, tracing our visual vocabulary to its roots in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Kanji characters and other ancient alphabets with rich illustrations, beautiful graphic design and typography, found objects, graffiti and more.
B from Linotype Zootype
The Zootype font, with its animal heads poking holes into the backs of letters, was created by Argentine designer Victor Garcia in 1997
E in lights
Composed of thousands of E-letters, rendered in a bright neon light, this image seems almost kinetic
F from Peter Blake's Alphabet
Pop artist Peter Blake is a master of typographic collages and found objects
Sacks explores the persona of each of the 26 letters of the alphabet, treating it as a separate symbol with its own design history and cultural legacy. It’s interesting to consider letters outside the context of text and words — suddenly, they come to life as conceptual creations that carry a powerful and complex aesthetic, symbolic and interpretational charge.
The letter N, rendered in grass
X from Pin Ups
From a provocative book shaping letters out of women's bodies represented by negative space
And for a special tickle of our appetite for creative derivatives of the London Tube map, this gem:
Q from A to Z
London-based designer and illustrator Tim Fishlock posterized Harry Beck's famous alphabet made of sections and lines from the London Underground map
From Braille to the Morse code to Muji alphabet ice cube moulds, Alphabets covers an astounding range of linguistic symbolism, giving the nostalgically familiar alphabet book of our childhoods an adult upgrade with remarkable design sophistication and aesthetic sensibility.
Images courtesy of The Guardian
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