Type of Place

Can particular cultural identities be expressed through vernacular typography? And what can we learn from isolating typography from different parts of the world? In collaboration with Nathan Davis (VCUQatar), we believe there is such a thing as “typography of place” and are curious how it can be defined in today’s more globalized cultures.

Our project, Type of Place, began documenting and archiving vernacular typography in Reykjavik, Iceland in 2011, and has continued with additional collections in Seattle, Toronto, Rome, Budapest, Prague, Vienna and others — with an aim to address these research questions.

This existing collection has convinced us that the project has significant merit, not only as an archive for historic purposes and for our own research agenda, but also as a resource for future lines of research for the entire design education/research community. We prototyped an Instagram-like mobile app, in order to create a global, user-generated, photographic archive of vernacular typography in the 21st century. We believe that the best way to build a significant database of this nature is through the lens of mobile technology. To learn more, or if you are interested in partnering with us on this project, please contact me directly.

Type of Place began at the ATypI Conference in Reykjavik, Iceland. Nathan Davis and I hosted a workshop where attendees used their cell phones to capture type in the vernacular in this city. We later projected all of the photos on a hand-sewn screen in a retail space on Laugavegur (Reykjavik’s main street).

This second collection is from Rome. We presented both collections at Design March in Reykjavik six months later. We blended the images with each other to create an interactive experience that allowed viewers to guess which city the type came from. We cropped the words to help remove their meaning.

We presented the Type of Place project at the ATypi Conference in Barcelona, where we unveiled the intention to create an app.

At the time of the conference, we had a few collections of type and were hopeful that building an app would help us crowdsource a larger collection more quickly.

The Type of Place app was first presented in beta at the FaceForward Conference in Dublin, Ireland. The app lets users take photos and upload them with accessible typographic-focused keywords. The photos are also geotagged and searchable in terms of location and keyword descriptions. Users can also source older photos on their phones and upload them as well. Future goals include creating an improved app, with additional features such as creating savable sets; the ability to export sets; and development on other platforms besides iOS.