F

Flavorwire

Typography

Architecture

Alphabet-Inspired Architecture Around the World

By Alison Nastasi on

Axis Architects’ created the H-House — a modern, Salt Lake City residence designed to capture the expansive views of the valley. “The volumes of the house follow the slope of the terrain and reinforce the integration of the house into its environment,” the architects write on their website. The end result is a subtle succession of H-shaped lines, emphasizing the home’s unique character.

Alphabet-style architecture has been around for centuries, originally created to minimize the distance to the structure’s exterior walls, and maximize natural light and ventilation. Since then, architects have found new and creative ways to incorporate the ABCs in all they do, and we’ve explored the design trend of syllabary structures after the break. … Read More

Design

The Helvetica Alphabet as a Squadron of Heroes

By Emily Temple on

Here at Flavorpill, we’re pretty big nerds about typography, and you know we love superheroes, so we’re always going to bite when we see the two cleverly combined. We recently saw superheroes matched with their typographic counterparts, but graphic designer René Mambembé has another vision — that Helvetica works for everyone. In his clever series Helvetica, My Hero, which we first spotted over at Neatorama, Mambembé recasts pop culture heroes (and villains) as letters in everyone’s favorite font, from an upside-down B for Batman to a debonair J for James Bond. Now if only we could turn this into a functional typeface. Click through to see Mambembé superpowered alphabet — and then be sure to head over to his Behance page to see even more from the series. Fonts to the rescue! … Read More

Design

Superheroes and Their Typographic Counterparts

By Heba Hasan on

After enduring the SATs, we weren’t too fond of analogies in any form. Thankfully, artist Matthew Olin has all but erased our negative connotations with the semantic riddle. Olin, whose work we spotted on Design Taxi, uses analogies to make connections between famous fonts and even more famous superheroes. “The most distinguishing factor of any font is its characters,” Olin says of his typographic classifications. “Hidden beneath these characters, each typeface also has character — its own unique characteristics.” See a selection of Olin’s superhero-and-font pairings after the jump, and be sure to check out more of his thoughtful, analogical work here. … Read More

Design

Wanted: The Alphabet of Typography

By Caroline Stanley on

You know by now that we’re total suckers for anything typography-related around here, so you can only imagine how excited we are by the latest print from Brooklyn design collective Pop Chart Lab: the incredibly fetching Alphabet of Typography, a limited-edition “primer on the wonders of typography, including serifs, hooks, diacritics, spines, ligatures, and more.”… Read More

Art

A Collection of Wonderful Readable Art

By Emily Temple on

Maybe it’s the fact that we moonlight as book nerds, but to us, there’s something singularly compelling about art that incorporates the written word. Maybe it’s because we so often see and use words as purely utilitarian, and it’s satisfying to see them in a representative, artistic sense — or maybe it’s just because we’re suckers for pretty typography in all its forms. Either way, we feel like we’ve been seeing an abnormal amount of text-based art in the past few months, so we were inspired to put together a little roundup of some of our favorite works in the genre, from old to new, from slapdash paintings to meticulously cut paper works. Click through to peruse our completely incomplete collection of typographical art we love, and be sure to add to our collection in the comments. … Read More

Design

Inspirational Posters Made for Minimalists

By Claire Cottrell on

There’s nothing we need more at the start of a new week that officially marks the beginning of the countdown to the charmingly unambitious dog days of summer than a few inspiring, well-designed words to remind us to keep calm and carry on.

One of our favorite Nobel Prize-winning poets and novelists, Rudyard Kipling, believed that “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” We couldn’t agree more. From John Baldessari’s tips for artists to graphic declarations about life and love to our favorite poster from Mike Mills’ modern self-help series to inspirational daily reminders that we recommend hanging above desks, on fridges and in bedrooms, click through to check out our roundup of well-designed typographic sunshine. Submit your favorite warm and fuzzy words of wisdom in the comments below! … Read More

Art

Breathing Life Into Dead Words with Beautiful Typography

By Tom Hawking on

Regular Flavorpill readers will probably know that we’re suckers for typography, and also for interesting words, so we were rather delighted to stumble across a project that manages to combine the two. It’s blog called The Dead Words, which we discovered via CMYBacon. The project is curated by graphic designer Karen To, and it focuses on words that have slipped from popular usage over the years, attempting to reanimate them with the assistance of thematically appropriate typography. To be honest, we’re more interested in the words themselves than the way they’re laid out — who knew, for instance, that “senticous” meant “prickly or thorny”? — but the idea as a whole is a fascinating one. Check out some of our favorite dead words after the jump, and see if you can guess what they mean (we’ve included the definitions below the images.) … Read More

Design

3D Typography Inspired by Famous Architects

By Caroline Stanley on

If you’re the kind of person who can’t help but swoon when you come across a smartly-conceived building — or who bristles when confronted with a shoddy structure that resembles nothing more than a great, big box of ugly — then you’re going to love this 3D typography series by UK-based graphic designer Christopher Labrooy, which pays homage to the work of famed architects like Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito, and Oscar Niemeyer. Click through to see what he’s come up with so far, and leave your nominations for who he should tackle next in the comments. We’re thinking Renzo Piano. Or Steven Holl. Or SANAA. Or Jeanne Gang. Really, he can’t go wrong! … Read More

Design

Punk Rock Posters, Remixed Swiss Modernist-Style

By Judy Berman on

The very best band that broke up last year, Double Dagger, had a great song called “Punk Rock vs. Swiss Modernism” — a tension that, as graphic designers and hardcore musicians, they understood well. It isn’t clear whether their fellow designer, Mike Joyce of Stereotype Design, had the song in mind when he embarked upon his Swissted posters, but they certainly serve as an apt companion piece. The series uses Swiss modernist typography to reimagine real flyers from ’70s-’90s punk shows, with results we wouldn’t mind displaying on our wall. (Seriously, Mike, how do we buy these?) See a selection of our favorites after the jump, and then visit Swissted to check out the entire, enormous project. … Read More

Art

Photo Gallery: Amazing Ice Typography

By Caroline Stanley on

It’s a good thing that environmental artist Nicole Dextras hails from Canada, because we don’t imagine that her stunning installations — which range from 8-foot high ice letters on the Yukon River to 18-inch high letters in downtown Toronto — would survive for very long in warmer climes. “The visual poetry in this series aims to subvert the authority of the English language and the commerce of signage by representing words as vulnerable and shifting,” she explains. “Ice Typography absorbs light, melts and eventually leaves no trace; these words have more in common with dreams and oral stories than linear language. Words cast in ice interrupt our literal narratives, allowing a more integrated reading of the land we inhabit, as opposed to the past and current commodification of land as limitless resource.” Click through to check out a selection of images from the series, and head over to Dextras’ website for more of her creative work, which includes clothing that’s made out of weeds and dresses frozen in blocks of ice. … Read More