Recently, I posted an interview with type designer Verena Gerlach in which she laments the disappearance of shop signage & lettering (sources she’d used to design FF Karbid). Shops change hands, old signs are taken down or painted over and, in the process, numerous examples of wonderful lettering are forever lost. And that got me to thinking about their ‘digital’ preservation. As a keen user of Instagram, I see hundreds of great photos of signage and lettering, many of them geotagged.
I mentioned this idea to Kari, and, in no time at all, he produced WLT World.
With Google’s Street View and an accurate geotag, you can see exactly where the photo was snapped.
So, get tagging and geotagging. Tag your photos of lettering and signage with #wlt or #welovetype and ensure you have geotagging enabled, so that they can be mapped.
We won’t automatically import all tagged photos — that ensures we don’t end up with hundreds of photos of Taylor Swift, often tagged #WLT (We Love Taylor).
Perhaps some day, with enough photos, we could produce curated vernacular ‘type’ tours, whizzing around the streets, learning more about the type and lettering that surrounds us. We might even make an app for that.
Visit WLT World.
Sponsored by H&FJ.
We love your streets