Local Lettering

I had the pleasure of meeting typographer Alanna Munro during one of Mark Busse’s Creative Mornings. Alanna is working on an outstanding project where she is slowly digitizing the hand-made and unique fonts that have appeared on some of Vancouver’s oldest and most at-risk architecture. The signs, by nature of their crafting, have come to represent an embedded and identifiable shared memory in our urban fabric. Alanna describes her work below:

There are small pockets of Vancouver that are home to golden letters that live proudly on the door of the building they name. I started a project called Local Lettering in order to study and catalog these letterforms before they aged, disappeared, or got knocked down. 

One of the really interesting things that this project highlights is the relationship between a building and its name. The modern buildings going up around the city always have a name for marketing purposes, but when the building is done this name becomes more of an afterthought, sliding into the background, sometimes never making it on to the building facade. Eventually, people will forget what that building was called, just as we have forgotten the names of the apartment buildings which have lost their golden letters.

For the buildings that have lost their letters, some have been replaced with cheap vinyl letters which no longer speak the same language as the architecture. As a work of design, the building has lost some of its consistency and character. I think this idea leaves a big opportunity for architects to work with typographers to make sure every detail of their building is speaking the same language, and nothing is added as an afterthought.

-Alanna Munro