Alphabet Mosaics

Fire Poi Typography- Letters
Originally uploaded by Nir Tober

As you can probably tell, I like unusual alphabets. Flickr has a lot of alphabet groups. Here's one with which to start.

Typography: Letters in the Natural World

In the spring of 1960, Kjell Sandved arrived at the Smithsonian to conduct research. There, he met Barbara Bedette, the woman who was to become his collaborator, friend, and love of his life. And there, also, he discovered an old cigar box full of butterflies and moths. Among the specimens in the box was one with the letter “F” woven in a tapestry of color on it’s wing, reminding Kjell and Barbara of the embellished letters in old bibles and illuminated manuscripts. The discovery was to change their lives. They decided to travel the world and find all the letters of the alphabet from the wings of butterflies and moths. If there was one letter, there must be others.

The challenges were many, not least, Kjell knew nothing about photography and Barbara, nothing about butterflies or where the greatest diversity of design could be found. But, they persevered and in 1975, after years of traveling to botanical gardens, nature reserves and rainforests from the Amazon to New Guinea, and surviving malaria-infested jungles, leeches and ants while photographing letters and numbers on the wings of butterflies and moths (without killing any), their discovery was revealed in the first issue of the new Smithsonian magazine.

Visit the site and discover another nature alphabet and play around with both of them, even send an e-mail.

Typography: Alphabet Crackers

bokstavskex n. biscuits, shaped like letters of the alphabet, manufactured by Göteborgskex and sold throughout the Nordic countries, hence the inclusion of the Nordic letters å, ä, ö, ø, and œ.

Convert words into biscuits. The bokstavskex automatic biscuit image generator will take words of your choosing and set them in type composed of alphabet digestive biscuits. For some reason, though, the alphabet is missing the letters 'q', 'w' and 'z’ and it doesn’t look like the missing letters are going to show up anytime soon. The present alphabet appears to have been created sometime in the late 1990s and the missing biscuit letters are, well, still missing. But, if you are curious, you can listen to a phone call, in Swedish (transcript available), placed to the cracker manufacturer asking why they weren’t included.