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Book Review: Shapes for Sounds by Timothy Donaldson

A is for Aleph. B is for Beit. G is for Gimel...

When I was a child, Hebrew was beaten into me by a series of well-meaning teachers. Upon reflection, they were probably my first foray into hand-lettering type. Sadly, the letters stuck, but comprehension of the words peeled away past my teenage years. I have always had a nagging thought in the back of my head that if I’d seen a clearer historical thread between Hebrew and modern English, I would have better retained the language.

Shapes for Sounds, a lovingly crafted book by Timothy Donaldson and published by Mark Batty, explores the birth and maturation of the Latin alphabet in both written and spoken mediums across the whole of Europe and the Middle East, and so much more. It clearly demonstrates the path from the first recorded alphabets all the way to our native tongue of English through the lens of my first love as a designer: typography.

Read my full review of Shapes for Sounds at The Designer's Review of Books

What Should I Do With TypographyPolice.com?

Oh, the curse of a great URL, purchased amid a flurry of irrational anger at a poorly designed, awfully kerned, Comic Sans-ridden sign in a bakery window. TypographyPolice.com, what shall I do with thee? You are about to expire, and I should probably renew you and actually do something with the domain.

Some ideas that came to mind in the heat of the moment:

1. A running blog of terrible type examples from the real world, with pointers as to how to avoid those mistakes.

2. Along with those terrible type samples, highlights of amazing typography alongside a series of 20 or so rules that designers can follow to rock the their type hardcore.

3. A Type Police exam and, upon passing, a membership card that showed that you were a Type Policeperson and were fully authorized to smack down on the terrors that face us in a Microsoft Word-dominated world.

4. Printable tear-off sheets that people could use to paste violations on real-world stuff. (Design-Police.org started this after I bought this URL, which made me quash the idea of TypographyPolice, but really, these are different things, right?)

What else could this domain represent? How can we save the world from ridiculous typography and the terrors that it imprints on the public at large?