Case study

Typeface in Nature

A photographic alphabet of letterforms found in everyday objects and surroundings, traced into a hand-drawn line font.

Graphic Design
Illustration
Photography

Overview

Typeface in Nature is a found-type project. I photographed letters hiding in everyday surroundings, like branches, rope, metal fixtures, fences and plants, and built a full A to Z alphabet from them. I then traced each photographed letter into a simple line structure to form the skeleton of a font. I shot with a Sony camera and composed the posters in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Challenge

The hard part was completeness. Some letters, like O or L, turn up easily, while others take a lot of looking. Each photo also had to read clearly as its letter once cropped to a small square, even though every one comes from a different material, color and background.

Approach

I walked around with the camera looking for shapes that matched each letter, then cropped every find to a matching square tile. I set the tiles in rows on a black background under a heavy, retro display title in mustard yellow, with "in nature" in a light script beside it, so the variety of textures reads as one alphabet. For the second poster I traced the core stroke of each photographed letter as a single white line, keeping the wobble and odd proportions of the original objects. That line alphabet is labeled "Line structure of the font."

Outcome

The project resulted in two framed posters: a photographic alphabet grid of found letters from A to Z, and a companion sheet showing the traced line structure that could be developed into a handwritten-style typeface.

Published January 28, 2024Tools Photoshop, Illustrator, Sony Camera (unspecified)View on Behance ↗