Lettering and locality in the age of globality

Abstract:

I’m fascinated by the fact that lettering and typography can say so much about its time and place of making; quite apart from, and related to, any particular functional aspect it may be.

This fascination plays out in different ways.

I’ve been documenting public lettering at home and on my travels for over twenty years now. Just as with the design of typefaces and printed material before the twentieth century, these things exhibit a sense of locality fused with a historical dimension. But the relationships between time and place are not always fixed, so the spread and popularity of styles can be charted.

In my work, like many designers, I’ve wrestled with the seemingly conflicting demands of personal identity, clients needs, and graphic design orthodoxies such as international modernism. And I’ve been interested in the notion of tradition in its strict definition ‘I hand over’.

But I sometimes wonder if I am a relic. If these issues matter in an age of contradiction, where the differences between objects produced in different places is becoming less and less. Where influences are instant. And always. And everywhere …