Lost Typography

Whether it’s the fresh Spring days or me making more of an effort, I don’t know, but I seem to be getting out of the house a bit more lately. And, as a result, I’ve been doing my best to look around my surroundings a little more as it feels like Winter has closed down my peripheral vision.

At the start of the week I decided to start taking some rather fumbly and rudimentary shots of little examples of typography that appear around us on the street and that we often tend to disregard. I’m fascinated by this. Especially when you consider that someone somewhere has taken the decision to utilise a particular type of font to meet the requirements of the task in hand. Sometimes this decision is purposeful and may have come from a discerning or experienced mind and conversely I quickly noticed just how much urban typography seems to have no obvious reasoning behind it at all. But we still digest these fonts without really thinking -  placing the message, word or number itself as a priority and never really deconstructing how that message was conveyed to us. I suddenly realised how much municipal signage uses sans-serif type for clarity or that there is a lack of italics in instructional advice.

There is a great flickr pool and Tumblr blog that pretty much covers the front of urban typography. But I think it’s interesting to try this yourself. It doesn’t take any time at all to build up an large collection. OK, you might look a bit of fool taking a snap of a drain cover, but it’s really surprising just how much detail you begin to notice when you’re actually looking for it.