Document setup

In InDesign, we divided the page into a grid of six columns by seven rows using Layout > Create Guides. To fill this grid with text frames, we used a feature called Gridify. You won’t find it on the menu; Gridify requires some nifty finger work worthy of a concert pianist (or a teenager sending a text message). Here’s how it works: With the Type tool, click and drag out a text frame. Keep holding down and press the Right/Left Arrow to add/remove columns and the Up/Down Arrow to add/remove rows, until you have a framework of threaded text frames that corresponds to your grid.

On the pasteboard, we typed out the city name. At this point we don’t care what it looks like. Size, color, font — irrelevant. All we’re concerned about is pressing Return after each letter. That’s right, every letter is its own paragraph. We copied and pasted this a bunch of times — at least eight — and then selected all the text and copied and pasted it into the text frames. Because the frames are threaded, the text flowed to the next frame after it had filled the first and so on. We tried not to be alarmed that it looked a complete mess at this point. This part was just about getting text on the page.

Create a color palette

Switching our attention to the colors, because we wanted some randomness, we needed more colors than we had letters — six in this case. This is so that when applied in sequence, the same color will not be applied to the same letter and no obvious pattern will emerge. Here’s our first “trick”: We made one of the colors exactly the same as the background so that when applied, it was effectively invisible.

We think that colors always look better when there’s a backstory to why you chose them. Like everybody else, we sometimes choose colors just because “they look cool,” but when there’s a rationale behind the color choice it feels like we’re doing it properly. In this case, the colors were sampled from the iconic London Underground map, originally designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Although the map has gone through many refreshes since (not least because additional tube lines have been added), it has remained true to the original, and the colors of the different tube lines are instantly recognizable to any Londoner.

Type choice

Wanting a typeface that evokes the place, our obvious choice was Gill Sans, because of its associations with Britain in general and London in particular.

Create the first paragraph style for the type. Along with its other formats, it should include a Keep Option to start the paragraph in the next frame. This is why we pressed Return after each letter. The Keep Option ensures that each paragraph/letter moves to its own text frame. This is where things start to take shape.

Now create a series of paragraph styles, each based on the first but with a different color. You want these styles to be applied in sequence, so in the Next Style property make “2” the next style after “1,” “3” the next style after “2,” and so on. When you get to the last style, set its Next Style property to the first style in order to create a repeating loop.

With the styles ready, select all the text, right-click the first style in the sequence and choose Apply [style name], and then choose Next Style.

Each letter should now be in a different color, in its own text frame. All that remains is to vertically center each letter within its frame. Select the text frames, choose Object > Text Frame Options, and choose Center from the Vertical Justification menu. To finesse the vertical centering, in Baseline Options, change the First Baseline offset to Cap Height — although this will vary from font to font.

To offset the first row so that it functions as a title, make the letters in the first row all the same color. Delete the text frames of the second row to create some distance between the header row and the rest of the letters.