On Letters

In the previous post, I discussed LetterPlayground, which gave people a place to express their creativity about letters - the symbols they are surrounded with.

And it got me thinking.

That's all that letters are; they are just symbols, used to create meaning. And that's how letters began in the first place. Letters became symbols because they represented sounds of particular objects. For instance, the letter T and its design originated from the word Tree. This occurred because people wanted to communicate the word Tree and needed a way to visualize it.

Photo from Flickr

Then the idea of letters became more solidified, and they became fairly concrete conceptions. At LetterPlayground, designers create visual representations of the letters. In this way, letters have come full circle - from pictures to symbols, and back to pictures again. But this time, the pictures are different. They are being created for fun rather than for the purposes of developing a way of communicating. To quote Alanis Morissette, isn't it ironic?

Letter Playground

At LetterPlayground, users have created artistic representations of letters and numbers and posted them. Then other users can leave comments, create a list of favorites, et cetera. LetterPlayground is designed for typographic designers and for people who think creatively about the symbols they are surrounded with.

One interesting feature of LetterPlayground is the Letter Count, which graphs the amount of letters being submitted.
Another interesting feature is that LetterPlayground gives the statistical proportion of its members' occupations in a nice simple pie chart. Pie Charts are a great way to visualize large amounts of information.

LetterPlayground is interesting because it opens up a new side of typography. It allows people to really play with letters and numbers in a way they probably haven't done since watching Sesame Street as a child.

Photo from Flickr

It reminds me of the playfulness of the giant letters on the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. That's a literal letter playground. This is a figurative one.