Words on their own

When words and letters acquires a life of their own. Ebon Heath liberates the letters from their frame, the printed page and creates laser-cut sculptures of the letters, giving them a three-dimensional existence with which viewers can actually interact.  His typography sculptures, called Stereo.type, become a magical transformation of the written word into what he describes as a “new language of physical type.”

See more after the jump

For the love of words

And not your basic, everyday words. Words that sound beautiful. Words that describe complex feelings or situations. Ancient words and neologisms. Words that exist for the benefit of word-lovers. Otherwordly is a tumblr that collects the most particular words from languages around the world. Here is a small anthology.

  

The hardly spoken words

The difficult words, the unusual words: all these words that are rarely spoken and whose meaning we cannot even imagine. Designers James and Michael Fizgarald, the illustration duo from Ireland, also known as The Project Twins, have ‘gathered’ all these words that are rarely spoken and managed to visually explain them.

Acersecomic: a person whose hair has never been cut.

Zugzwang: a position in which any decision or move will result in problems.

Do you know any of them? See more peculiar words after the jump.

Inspiring words

A man’s wisdom in just one sentence. Clearly spoken and beautifully designed by Max Temkin, who in his project entitled Maxistentialism creates a set of Philosophy posters inspired by some of the most influential philosophers.

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Erased words

Just erase: words, commas, sentences to reveal the true emotion and find poetry. Newspaper Blackout, a Tumblr blog of Austin-based artist and writer Austin Kleon (included in TIME magazine’s list of the  30 Must-See Tumblr Blogs) creates”blackout poetry” just by blacking out unwanted text with a permanent marker and revealing new and shorter versions of poetic expression.

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Lorizzle sheezy dolizzle boom shackalack amet, funky fresh yippiyo you son of a bizzle

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nunc malesuada, est at varius faucibus, nisl massa suscipit velit, in pharetra nulla neque eu tellus.

Don’t tell me that you haven’t come across with these absurd Latin words? Lorem ipsum text is a placeholder text, used in graphic design to show how a web page/a mock up will look with real words once completed. It derives from sections 1.10.32–3 of Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum and makes no sense at all.

However, it seems that designers and other internet professionals got bored with the classic dummy text and new word generators pop up more and more often. Well, there is a text version for every taste.

Here is the gangsta version:

If you prefer a meatier approach:

A sweeter one:

More after the jump

Word as image

The great challenge: to ‘create an image out of a word, using only the letters in the word itself and their graphic elements without adding outside elements’. That was what Ji Lee, former Creative Director at Google Creative Labs (we first met him here), did in his new book Word as Image. Have a first look of his work in this wonderfully animated video:

You can find his book here.

via Quipsologies

See also:

• Words have a life of their own
• Clever words
• Words without words
• See the object, guess the movie

Strings of words

Art for transit enthusiasts? Yes, it exists, like these minimalistic maps made up of strings of words that spell the station names. TRNSPRTNATION is a series of typographic transit maps created by Fadeout Design, which include transit systems of Boston, London, New York, San Francisco, Washington DC and Chicago.

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Clever words

What happens when the Saussurian signifier and signified meet up in the form of a word? Beautiful typography.

Typeplay is a tumblr blog, which plays with words and their meanings creating typographically meaningful words and whose goal is to reach a million words.

See more words after the jump

Read it elsewhere

Around the web in 9 links:

• Understanding Shakespeare through brain scans – boingboing
• What are Spomeniks? – core77
• Writer lose their virginity – the hairpin
• If aliens try to speak to us there will be no one to hear them: SETI shuts down – mercury news
• The last remaining typewriter manufacturer shuts down, too – dvice
• What’s a tittle? A peen? A petrichor? – buzzfeed
• The bench that tweets – yanko design
• The birth of a word – TED talks on youtube
• YouTube drawings (stars, views and all) – without you baby via quipsologies

In their own words

If you were a writer and you were about to make your self-portrait, how would you draw yourself? Would you choose to depict an extract from your literary work perhaps? Artist and author John Sokol creates drawings of literary figures, whose outline of the face is crafted from the very words of their own works.

Jorge-Luis Borges and the Secret Miracle

See more portraits after the jump

From behind

Can you imagine how Twitter and Facebook would look like from behind? I am sure you can’t. Designers Jeff Lam and Josephine Yatar present in their blog Back of a Webpage a different and very creative ‘back view’ of most of our favourite websites. 

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Is a picture worth a thousand words?

One of the most beautiful scenes in the motion picture history restructured. In words.  Juan Osborne used the lyrics of the’ Singing in the Rain’ song to outline Gene Kelly’s figure of in his memorable dance. Juan Osborne creates mostly portraits of directors, writers, actors, politicians by choosing very carefully the words to incorporate in each of his subjects. He has even used over 200,000 words for just one piece.

If it is too blurry to view it,  just get some distance and it will appear clear. Check out some of his amazing portraits in his personal blog.

See also:

• Color outside the line
• Cinematic pictographs
• Minimal design, maximal inspiration
• See the object, guess the movie

True dat: rap advice, illustrated

I ‘ve told you, I ‘ve never been a huge fan of rap music, but I love everything that has to do with language and music. And I have to admit it: I stick more to lyrics than to music and I just loved Jessica Wright’s illustrations revealing some of the most inspirational words of rap music.

More after the jump

Words without words

Which one is stronger? A word or an image?

In Words without words, a visual dictionary of words with abstract, complex or underused meanings, these two are beautifully combined by illustrator, designer and new media artist, Veronika Heckova.

More definitions after the jump

The incredible shrinking sentence and other wonders of the english language in the year 2011

via Voxy

Scrabble words, scrabble fonts

A scrabble set for typography nerds. I love it!

Scrabble is the only board game that has (physically) survived my childhood and sits quietly at a cupboard in my living room. It’s a game for a lifetime. That’s what Andrew Capener thought: “Scrabble could be making a lot more money off of its players if there could be a way for them to constantly feel as if they need to update […] Since fonts are like fashion […] this would provide Scrabble with a way to keep customers coming back to them, wanting to update their set”.

And he created A-1, this magnificent, design-savy Scrabble set that has me drooling.

What I love the most? The ransom-note effect of words. Especially if it’s a kick-ass, 7 letter word, on a 3x multiplier. Oh, the thrill!

via every single design blog out there.

See also:

• See the object, guess the movie
• The thread of hypertextuality
• Touch music again

Time put to words

QLOCKTWO is a clock without hands and without numbers. It just tells you the time in words.

Created by Biegert & Funk, it is available in English, German, Dutch, Italian, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Swedish and Arabic.