The Buchstaben Museum (The Museum of Letters) was one of the highlights of my visit to Berlin! This museum is hidden in the corner of Berlin Carre Shopping Centre across from the TV tower at Alexanderplatz and is a mere €2.50 to gain access to this heaven of type. The musuem which is a non profit organisation was created in 2005 by Barbara Dechant and Anja Schulze, under a passion for typography. They wanted to rescue threatened letters from public spaces. The museum preserves and restores type not only from Berlin but from around the world too. Each letter in the museum has a card with its identity and information. The museum strives to document the history, origins and stories behind each of its pieces.

Every corner of this commercial space is overloaded with type, it is lying on the floor, piled one infront of the other against walls, hanging of string from pipes. This is only a temporary space for the museum until the owners can find somewhere permanent, and hopefully bigger.

No space is left unused, even the bathrooms are off limits as type is placed in there and showcased. I absolutely adore this. They just have so much to offer but just not enough space.

Some of the type on show is still in working order, which only adds to the exhibition. Some of the pieces have been plugged in to show them in their working glory.

I adored the organisation of this museum, lack of space does not prevent them from being creative with their presentation. The museum is split into many small rooms and some of these rooms are colour coordinated, there is a yellow room, a blue room, and a red room! The red room was my favourite room as it had the most eccletic taste in type styles, some quite coporate, some highly decorative.

This is a must see museum for any type geek or just general design lover. Check out the Buchstaben Website for more information…www.buchstabenmuseum.de
I shall definitely return on my next trip to Berlin. It is hard to describe how amazing this museum is, it truly is something you have to see with your own eyes. The owners are doing an amazing thing, rescuing all these amazing specimens of type which would otherwise be destroyed and forgotten about.
The musuem accepts donations and sponsors, to help keep it running. You can also adopt a letter, which is something I am very tempted to do, in order to help this project grow. You can also help the museum grow… if you have seen a display letter worthy of rescue send photos, contact information and information about the location to the museum via their website.

The Buchstaben Museum current location:
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 13,
10178 Berlin,
Alexanderplatz,
Berlin Carre,
1.0G/1st Floor

Opening Hours:
Thu—Sat, 1—3pm

Entrance:
€2.50

This semester we were given a live project- to rebrand a local printers to provide them with the best exposure possible. Their current brand is a mish mash of a hoarding culture of their history. Currently they have 3 different logos, each very different, each showing the progression of the company. I wanted to simplify their brand and provide the company with one simple design that would be instantly recognisable to them.

I decided to simply the entire look and feel, choosing to go with the simple ‘N&B’. I hand rendered and design a unique ampersand for Nicholson and Bass, the rights of which would be theirs. This would give them instant brand recognition from a single character in their logo. They are a printers to many facets of the design community, but mainly do print for fine art companies. I wanted the brand to marry both the print and fine art community. The ampersand was my way of doing so, I took inspiration from the Baskerville Ampersand but with my own modern twist. After doing so then intertwined it with the N and B to show the close knit relationship ethos of the company. Out of 50 people I was shortlisted by the company within the top five.

This is the proposal booklet, I hand made and handed in to the company as a summary of my brand strategy.

Cheese Mouse.

This was my first design, I decided to keep it simple by just using a circle and cutting out smaller circles for the counters, I feel it is quite a useable font, that would work well for titles and such.

Squarmetric.

This font I created by using the square as my body and using the pill to cut out the shapes of each letter.  I was quite pleased with this design, it’s not as predictable as the first and I think it all fits well together, like a jig saw.  It again is a very useable font, bold and slab in style it would make quite a statement.

Ice Lolly.

This font I created using the triangle and pill shape to create the letter shape and then I incorporated the pill for the counters of the letters.  I think the choice of two different colours really adds to this font and makes it font, it splits each letter up into sections but pulls the entire font together.  It a more abstract font from my previous fonts, the letters would read well in a word or sentence but some on their own might be a bit too difficult to decipher.  All in all though I was very pleased with this font design, it’s playful, it’ s different, it’s unique and it is very useable.

Click Fit.

This font I created by using the triangles by altering the sizes and fitting them together to create the letter shapes.  I used a different colour for each triangle and I think that that makes this font very successful, and the use of white space, the triangles are not tight there’s air between them that makes it flow better.  The colours aren’t bright and cheerful, they are very useable and this makes it professional.  It’s a very sharp, industrial, masculine font that would work well as signage for trucks and such.

Bubblegum.

I had so much fun creating this font, it is such a fun font; the colours, the fonts.  I created this font by using the pill shape, each of different colours and all over laying each other.  The colours are playful and I think this font design would work so well for branding for something fresh and fun, and I created a mini logo by using the pill shape and I think it worked so well.  The ‘v’ needs some work it looks tiny in comparison to the rest of the fonts.  This is a very useable font and I am so proud of it.

I recently completed a project in which I was given 4 shapes; a square, circle, triangle and pill shape and from these I had to create a modular world and a font.  I decided to break away from all the computer design I had done and create my font in 3d.  I wanted to go back to basics and so I decided to used sugar cubes and stack them into letters and photograph them.  Whilst looking out of the windows of my university studio I saw that all of the surrounding buildings were made from modular shapes and so I decided to photograph my letters against the live city background, so my font was towering in the modular world.  I took photographs and these are a few of my outcomes.  I think they are powerful images.