When you go away on vacation, do you usually eat at a chain restaurant or a unique, local establishment? If you want to experience something interesting and new, you’d go for the latter. And just like regional cuisine, there are flavors of regional typography, though they may be increasingly hard to find in this “anywhere is everwhere” age of corporate mergers and globalization.
Vernacular Typography is a site devoted to identifying and documenting unique regional typography in advertising, signage, and other bits of visual culture.
The site has tons of photos of unique type from New York City, as well as collections from other cities around the U.S. and the world.
The larger goal of the project is to promote awareness of each area’s unique typographic heritage, and to encourage the preservation of it. Worthy goals, for sure. But you can also visit the site just to check out some cool type designs. And it might inspire you to grab your camera and document some vanishing type in your neck of the woods.
To learn more, check out the Vernacular Typography blog.
This article was last modified on October 22, 2013
This article was first published on October 22, 2013
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
Recommended for you
Good Things in Small Packages
Small capital letters—small caps, as we say in the trade—are a typesetting mains...
Learn Typography in Ten Minutes with Butterick’s Practical Typography
What could you learn in ten minutes? A few Photoshop tips? How to speed read (so...
Be Creative with Initial Letters
An initial letter is the first character of a sentence that is enlarged, positio...