I love working with type, both digital and manual. I enjoy running it in, formatting it, kerning it, tracking it and generally shifting it around. Sure, it’s a way to make a living, but even if it weren’t, I’d still want to mess around with letterforms and chunks of text. I’d still want to marvel at the thicks and thins, the swashes, and pieces of foreign punctuation. I’m not ashamed to admit that smelling a rose and seeing some really lovely oldstyle figures are parallel experiences for me.
In running around town recently, some really big type has caught my eye. And it’s made out of… leaves. If size is your thing, you can have your solvent printer banners, your backlit lexan, your painted parking lots. But huge expanses of typographically engineered shrubbery, situated on slightly elevated patches of landscape… well, this stuff rocks really bad!
On my way to Wrightsville to get tomatoes, I saw this lovely sans serif planting at Cooper Tools. Wow, I wonder what point size that is? It’s nicely spaced, scrupulously groomed and a masterwork of pruning. And it really looks like their logo, which is pretty damned impressive. Try kerning this baby with your Black & Decker Dual Action Hedge Trimmers!
Diehl Toyota decided to go the print metaphor route, and place their typographic topiary on a pristine white rock background, and the letters are elevated slightly above a masonry retaining wall baseline. And what’s really impressive is that they even used their proprietary lettering (lower case i) in this planting. Talk about consistency in identity! I really like the way Mother Nature’s drop shadow changes trajectory as you pass. Makes me feel guilty about driving a Honda.
Suddenly remembering that Target had a living version of their logo on the approach to their store, I tore over there to get a good digital shot of it. It had been articulated in a red-leafed shrub, on a bed of attractive brown stones. But to my dismay, there must have been a shake up at Target, and this idyllic identity has gone to pot. It’s hard enough now to find an employee who doesn’t “call off” every other day, much less one who will cheerfully empty the trash bins and walk to the end of the parking lot and fine tune the beziers in the logo with a trimmer. Too bad.
Bush says he owes everything he is to Jesus, but when’s the last time you saw Jesus made out of bush? Pretty interesting. In West York there’s a church that has this planting at the edge of their parking lot. It gives interesting insight into the formation of letterforms by using groups of tiny shrubs, getting them all together in the same place, tightly controlling them with rigid constraints, lopping them off if they don’t comply, and requiring that they contribute a standard percentage of green. I could be mistaken, but I think this lights up around the holidays.
This post appeared in the original version of E.M. Summer 2007 m.m.r.
