Gerrymandered districts are perhaps the most visible forms of political corruption, dramatically redrawn into implausible shapes to benefit one political part or another. The idea for this font dubbed “Gerry” by Ben Doessel and James Lee explores just how many forms these places are bent into — as it turns out, one can make an entire alphabet out of them.

“To ensure the eroding of democracy isn’t an issue that is lost in the news cycle, our design team from Chicago concocted a creative way to keep our warped voting districts top-of-mind,” says the font’s makers. “What looks like a ‘G’ is really the 4th Congressional district of Ohio, the ‘E’ is actually Missouri’s 6th district, and so on.”

The font, downloadable for free, started with Chicago’s 4th District, which the designers noticed had a distinctive “U” shape. Searching around, they found more and more letters, and realized they could create a full typeface from their discoveries. Since then, gerrymandering has stayed in the spotlight, and Gerry has been used on things like the US constitution. Its hard-to-read letters make it less than ideal for legibility, but that isn’t the point — the message is in the shapes themselves.

Warping classical fonts into rich mural art, Peter Preffington (or: Pref) uses three-dimensional complexity to draw the eye to deceptively simple messages.

A veteran street artist, Pref has “always been interested in the idea of graffiti speaking to the general public,” and has “pushed and experimented with this idea of overlapping words, seeing how many I can fit into the space of one word, and then slowly boiling it down and simplifying this idea to become more legible.”

Some present as simple on the surface, but reveal other words (often related via a known phrase) upon inspection — “more,” for instance, lurking within the word “less.” a “smoke” and “mirrors” takes some time to decipher as well.

The works are designed to be figured out, but also use positive and negative space in creative ways, unfolding like a visual puzzle. In a way, this is both typical of tags, which can be hard to make out, but also a break from tradition in that they are crisp, clear and made to be understood.

By writing in a more comprehensible way, Pref aims to make his work more accessible to the public, opening up a wider audience to the appreciation of type-based graffiti art in shared spaces.

Typefaces get the graphic treatment with art and design projects that infuse lettering with fun and functionality alike, from ‘Braille Neue’ to specific typefaces rendered as dog breeds. What makes a German shepherd Helvetica? How can you sculpt your facial hair into every letter of the alphabet? Which letters make the best miniature golf courses?

Braille Neue Infuses Existing Characters with Accessibility

Braille and English characters come together in the font ‘braille neue’ by Kosuke Takahashi (also available in Japanese form.) The typeface overlaps the tactile bumps representing each letter with slightly modified versions of existing characters for a surprisingly seamless result that makes you wonder – why hasn’t this been done before?

“Currently, we rarely see braille implemented in the public space since it takes additional space and sighted people consider it not important. Braille Neue addresses this issue by making braille easy to use for sighted people. By spreading this typeset I believe more people will get acquainted with braille.”

Dogs as Fonts

If you had to pair dog breeds with typefaces, how would you go about the process? Designs studio Grafisches Büro compared the characteristics of bulldogs, pugs, dalmations and more with the look and feel of specific typography designs and paired them for a series of fun silk-screened posters. Do you agree with their findings?

Illustrated Typographic Mosaic Illustrations

The colors, patterns and other design sensibilities that make individual cities unique are distilled into typographic mosaic murals by designer Nick Misani. Real as they may look, this motifs inspired by Misani’s travels are actually digital. “For a long time, I’ve been obsessed with lettering, interior design, and decorative art, so mosaics – as an intersection between these three passions – have always been fascinating to me.”

Letter Desks

Do you need a lot of privacy and space to yourself? Maybe you’re a D. Prefer to share a desk surface with a friend so you can bounce ideas off each other? Y. If you like privacy but don’t need as much space, you can share an F with a friend. Designer Benoit Challand illustrates letter-shaped desks with his ‘Fold Yard’ concept, showing how each one can offer a unique workstation that meets very particular needs within an open workspace.

Interactive Font Map

The patterns that make specific fonts similar to each other are visualized by artificial intelligence in this useful interactive map by IDEO. The design team used AI and convolutional neural network for enhanced pattern recognition, displaying 750 fonts in an arrangement that can help designers choose which ones they want to employ for various projects. Check it out here.

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Just Your Type These 15 Typographic Projects Have Lots Of Character

Can you think of an iconic electronic object for every letter of the alphabet? A for Apple, B for Bose, C for Canon, D for Dell and so on, all the way to Z? Graphic designer Vinicius Araujo found the most obvious (and satisfying) answer for all 26 letters and crafted them into renderings of appropriately shaped electronics. The series, which he calls ‘36days Electronics,’ is based on the Helvetica typeface.

For Apple, there’s a classic Macintosh computer with a floppy disk drive; Bose looks like a speaker; Epson is a printer; Motorola is the most ancient of cell phones; Sony’s a Walkman.

Functionality isn’t the point here – a computer monitor shaped like a D obviously isn’t going to do you much good. But it’s a fun visual exercise that will likely spur some nostalgia for the technology days of yore – or perhaps gratitude that our gadgets have evolved.

See more photos at Vinicius Araujo’s Behance portfolio.

Exposed to the elements, hand-painted signs on building exteriors chip, crack and fade over time, but one artist is shining a spotlight on these historic illustrations, restoring them through animated and layered projections.

Craig Winslow is meticulous about his work on “Light Capsules,” digging through archived newspapers, magazines and photographs to find ads showing what these signs and their typogrophies originally looked like (in some cases over 100 years ago). The result of one such search recently helped him project over an ad in Winnipeg, Canada for Porter & Co., crockery, china, glassware, lamps, silverware, cutlery, which then switched to another projection for The Home of Milady Chocolates on the same spot.

And it isn’t just about recreation, but also spectacle and preservation. People passing by, used to ignoring faded signs, suddenly stop, look up and start thinking about them and the histories they represent as well as their historic value to a city.

In the last few years, Winslow has brought his projections to cities around the world including Detroit, London and Los Angeles. A lot of the advertisements he projects over provide insights into what was popular in the early 1900s when hand-painted signs were common.

His projections are often layered, cycling through to highlight different stages of ads (or overlapping ones) that have evolved and changed over the decades. Importing digital images, Winslow uses a suite of editing tools to fill in the gaps and create animations.

And while some argue for restoring them outright (using paint), that can be problematic — critics say repainting ruins the authenticity, plus new paints tend to be more vibrant and would be unlikely to represent the original. In a way, Winslow has found a middle ground — his method lets people get a sense of what they looked like without putting the originals at risk.

More from the artist’s website: “There’s an extra element of excitement in signs that are incredibly worn or have multiple layers—The best ghostsigns candidates to become Light Capsules have multiple layers, called palimpsests, providing a compelling canvas which digital recreations can bring a focus to specific layer in time. Projection is ephemeral, non-damaging, and non-invasive, providing a strong preservation solution that traditional mediums can’t provide. Using light as a medium, we can visually explore the stories of every layer, seeing how a building changed throughout the years.”