An A–Z Collection

Explore the personality of type

Create a photo book collection pairing type with objects

Square format

• Exploring the personality of typefaces and specific letters

• Working with large type

InDesign (or Illustrator)

Various

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Use the Character Viewer to explore the range of styles available in your installed fonts.

I love trees. They make great photographic subjects — resplendent in summer with their foliage and expressive in winter with their branches reaching up to the sky. And unlike people and wildlife, they stay still while I (Nigel) capture their portrait. Even though I’ve been photographing them for years, I know little about them. I can tell the difference between an oak and palm, but that’s about as far as it goes. Despite an app on my phone — I’m no good when it comes to identifying them. I just like how they look and feel reassured that they’re always there.

I realized that there were some trees that I photographed repeatedly and had started to name. I thought it would make a fun project to make a small A–Z photo book of trees — not to identify them with their common or scientific names, but just with the nicknames I’d given them, and to pair the tree with a particular typeface that shared similar attributes.

Once I had my shortlist of candidates, I used the Emoji viewer to explore the range of type styles available for each letter. On the Mac, I went to System Preferences > Keyboard and selected “Show keyboard and emoji viewers” in menu bar. Thereafter, it was accessible at the top right of my screen. For Windows users there is a free utility, BabelMap (babelstone.co.uk), that is equivalent.

I typed out the alphabet with a return after each letter and then flowed the story into a Primary Text Frame on the left pages. I then selected all the text, pumped it up to a size of 72 points as a starting point, went to Keep Options, and chose Start on Next Page. This put the letters in position. Next, because I no longer wanted the story threaded, I used the SplitStory script that comes with InDesign (on the Scripts panel, Application > Samples > JavaScript). This breaks the story into independent text frames. You can, of course, create your text frames one by one; it’ll just take a little longer.

Because I wanted each letter to fill the left side of my two-page spread, it was necessary to convert the type to outlines (Type > Create Outlines or Cmd+Shift+O/Ctrl+Shift+O), which made scaling and positioning easier. But there is a lot of back and forth in a project like this, so to be cautious, I kept a copy of each letter — editable — on a hidden layer, in case I changed my mind, which I’m prone to do.

I have anthropomorphized trees by giving them human names, and then I have done the same with typefaces by matching them up. Doing this may be strange, but it’s a great way to explore the personalities of different typefaces and to make connections between different areas of interest, be they from the natural or the built environment.

I finished this project by making it into a book, printed through an online photo book supplier — which will make a fine alphabet book, sure to confuse any visiting toddlers. However, a poster or website would be just as good.