Collecting Everyday Typography

I started collecting type by accident. A hand-painted sign on a bakery, a ticket stub, the label on a jar of pickles. Photos piled up on my phone until I noticed that I was learning more from them than from any specimen sheet.

Why bother collecting

Everyday lettering is made by people with a job to do and no time to be fashionable. It tends to be clear, a little strange, and very honest about its purpose. That combination is hard to invent at a desk.

Looking at it also trains the eye. After a few months I could say, without thinking, why one shop sign felt warm and the one next to it felt cold.

What I look for

• Spacing that breaks the rules and still reads perfectly.

• Letters adapted to a surface, such as stencils, bricks or glass.

• Hierarchy without size, where weight or position does the work.

• Signs of the hand, like a stroke that wobbles on purpose.

How I keep the collection useful

A pile of photos is a graveyard unless you can find things in it. I use a very small system, and I stick to it.

1. Photograph straight on, with the whole word in frame.

2. Add a one-line note: where it was, and what drew me in.

3. Sort once a month into a few loose folders:

   • Hand-made

   • Industrial

   • Printed ephemera

The notes matter more than the photos. A picture reminds me what a sign looked like, but the note reminds me what I was thinking, which is the part I actually reuse.

Turning finds into ideas

I never copy a sign. I pull out a single quality from it and ask how that quality could work in a project, for example generous spacing, a heavy first letter, or a very small caption under a very large word.

The goal isn’t to reproduce what you found. It is to find out why it worked.

A small exercise

Pick one photo and redraw only its proportions: where the weight sits, where the gaps are, how big the biggest thing is compared with the smallest. Everything else is decoration. You will often find that the structure is simpler than the lettering suggests.

Start with one street

You do not need to travel. Walk the street you know best and photograph ten things you have never noticed. It is a quiet way to remember that typography is not only something we choose, it is something we live inside. When you are ready to turn those finds into a palette of their own, Color Before Content is a good next read.