The image above is of Letterland which is my earliest memory of the alphabet, making characters out of each letter while learning to read. Flash forward 30 years and we’re still doing it, a favourite pastime of graphic designers is to dream up new alphabets and fonts. There are lots of really imaginative interpretations of the 26 letters of our alphabet out there so I thought I’d start collecting a few of my favourite A to Zs in one place. Some are more legible than others, but they’re all a bit of fun and go to show type can be a living analogue thing too.

I think this will become an ever-growing post as I find more of these. If you’ve found any, please post them in the comments…

Type the Sky by Lisa Rienermann, who tends to walk into lamp posts a lot.

Booksetting by Amandine Alessandra who hasn’t bought an Amazon Kindle yet.

Tiepography by Ed Nacional, who really needs some new shirts.

Handy by Public who are good at charades.

Heldentica by Autobahn who seem a bit wasteful.

Google Maps Typography by Rhett Dashwood who ironically suffers from vertigo.

Folded by Brian Jaramillo who has a lot of time on his hands.

Apple Alphabet by Ana Benaroya who’s getting her 5-a-day.

Ideographic Chairs by Amandine Alessandra again, who sleeps standing up.

Value Pack by Robert J Bolesta who buys one and gets one free.

Alphabet Truck by Eric Tabuchi who isn’t great at overtaking.

Backbreaker by Kalle Mattsson who makes friends easily.

Brød & Korn by Commando Group who have nice buns.

Here are more, as I find them…

Lego Font by Handmade Font who can never find the windscreen brick.

Lazer Dog by Oscar and Ewan who are quick but not brown.

Fire-Poi Typography by Nir Tober who has run away to join the circus.

East End Shopfronts by Eine who is a repeat offender.

Beard Alphabet by Tim Yarzhombeck who saves a lot on razor blades.

Bits by Paul Elliman who needs to declutter the house.

Lovely Ladies by Malika Favre of Airside who thinks boys smell.

Folded Paper Typeface by Daniella Spinat who makes great paper planes.

Interior by Andrew Byrom who secretly shops at Ikea.

Fire in the hole by Oliver Munday who had some childhood issues.

Lightbulbs by Adam Slowik who isn’t worried about his carbon footprint.

Pantone Typeface by Marc Alcock who likes Cool Gray 6.

Eatphabet by Alex Kapranos who has his clothes specially made.

Slotervaart Alphabet by Studio GloriusVandeVen who didn’t get planning permission.

Hirsutura by Craig Ward who has a blocked plughole.

Miss Alphabet by Sheriff who hope for world peace.

Zipper by Tony DiSpigna who never flies low.

Skullphabet by Skull-A-Day, who REALLY like skulls.

Human Alphabet by Monica Alisse, who is good at helping planes to land.

Typeface in Skin by Thijs Verbeek, who suffer for their art.

Download the PicLens plugin for Firefox and take your image searching full screen. A small button gets added to your browser bar and when you click it you get a beautiful fullscreen wall of the images on that page. You can even image search directly from PicLens by typing in the search field. The results get added to the wall as they download, making an ever growing scrolling display which is fun to play with even if it doesn’t return what you’re after…

I thought I’d post about Ffffound!, a great site which I actually stumbled across a while ago but have really got into recently. It’s basically del.icio.us or Flickr but for graphics, and it’s super simple and easy to use.

The site allows users to grab any image on the web (you can’t get at Flash content or stuff hidden inside framesets mind you) and clip it to their Ffffound! profile to browse later. It’s genius the way it’s done, you simple add a bookmarklet to your browser bar and press it when you’re on the page you want to save an image from. Magically all the images get a thick border and you simply click the one you want.

That’s it, no tagging, no posting, no logging in, it’s that easy. And I think that’s the key, because clipping things like this only becomes second nature, useful and enjoyable if it’s easy to do, with as few extra steps as necessary. I wrote a while ago about Boxedup, which is great, but adding a product to that site does require a bit of tinkering which sometimes is enough to make me think twice abut bothering at all, especially if I don’t have much time.

Ffffound doesn’t use tags (which seems to be a deliberate choice rather than an omission) but it can still track trends and suggests images for you based on your own preference, it also shows you when other users like similar things. There’s even a screensaver which displays either the site’s, or your own picks while your machine is idle…

The only things I guess I would like to see developed would be some way to actually find something specific on the site, as once a favourite of yours is a little older, it simply drifts somewhere within a long list. There’s no way of finding that lovely piece of type you remember saving a couple of months ago. I’d also like to be able to recommend images to other people when I find something I know they’d like or find useful. Other than that, unusually I’m going to resist suggesting bells and whistles, I think that’s part of the site’s charm.

The site is still quite small and it’s a private beta at the moment, only members can invite new ones. This is the reason I had passed it by up to now, but after being reminded about it on Ben Terrett’s blog I emailed the guys who run it and blagged my way in. It looks like a Japanese site (some practise for my Japanese reading skills) and may have something to do with Yugo Nakamura of yugop fame…

Thanks to Keita for inviting me in!