21-01-2022

Dutch Design Daily

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Henk Lamers & Jeanne de Bont -

Lecturis – Characters that speak

By 21-01-2022

Dutch Design Heritage

In 1990 we received an assignment from Drukkerij and Uitgeverij Lecturis to make typographic compositions for the interior of the new printing house on the Kalverstraat in Eindhoven. These had to express the ‘scattering of letters’ and they should have a connection with the printing process.

This led for us to the question: ‘Does one letter perhaps contain a message?’ Research yielded 531 possibilities with meanings of the 26 letters. There were several possibilities within a letter. Especially when you don’t limit yourself to the upper case, but also include the lower case and punctuation.

Some character combinations of that list were unusable. For example, the ‘a’ stands for stock shares. Still others offered a starting point for the final composition but had no connection with the printing process. In total there were 146 possibilities left.

The central letter in the composition will be black, unless the functionality benefits from magenta, yellow or cyan. The Gill Sans font of the Lecturis house style designed by Baer Cornet was central. Gill Bold for the main letter and the rest in Gill Light. Four letter heights were used, varying between 125 and 630 millimeters.

Henk Lamers
Jeanne de Bont

Photos: Jeanne de Bont