Lettermatch

Many graphic designers spend a lot of time in collecting inspirational typographic works on websites like Pinterest. One special subject of typography are monograms, which preserve exciting and inspirational typographic ideas.

Inspirational collections can be considered working tools for graphic designers. If you get stuck with your creative process you can just jump over to your inspirational board to get your eyes on your already preselected inspiraton.

However if you are using your inspiration board for monogram design you will notice that not every monogram idea is applicable on every letter combination. The question which letters can be used for a certain monogram idea depends on the individual geometry each letter has. For example monogram ideas with the rectangular letter E in use can be often transfered on geometric related letters like the F, but at first glance not on the circular letter O.

In most cases the geometric conditions of exciting monogram-inspirations are often not easy to spot, so it’s hard to tell with ease with monogram ideas from one’s inspiration board may be useful for inspiration or not.

This challenge is aggravated by the circumstance that there isn’t just one recognizeable letterform, but dozens of different kind of letterforms. That means if you pick an alternate letterform for the letter O that is rectangular, the letter may be finally applicable on monogram-ideas requiring a rectangular shape.

With this insight I imagined a monogram inspiration tool that relieves the designer from this work and provides a search interface that finds applicable monogram-ideas after the user entered the monogram’s letters. This fictitous monogram inspiration website (“Lettermatch”) was the topic of my bachelor thesis. Read more about it on redro.de.

Monograms shown in this post aren’t my property. Monograms owned by other copyright holders are used here under the guidelines of the Fair Use provisions.