We love your streets

Mar 6 2012

Save our signage

Recently, I posted an interview with type designer Verena Gerlach in which she laments the disappearance of shop signage & lettering (sources she’d used to design FF Karbid). Shops change hands, old signs are taken down or painted over and, in the process, numerous examples of wonderful lettering are forever lost. And that got me to thinking about their ‘digital’ preservation. As a keen user of Instagram, I see hundreds of great photos of signage and lettering, many of them geotagged.

I mentioned this idea to Kari, and, in no time at all, he produced WLT World.

With Google’s Street View and an accurate geotag, you can see exactly where the photo was snapped.

So, get tagging and geotagging. Tag your photos of lettering and signage with #wlt or #welovetype and ensure you have geotagging enabled, so that they can be mapped.

We won’t automatically import all tagged photos — that ensures we don’t end up with hundreds of photos of Taylor Swift, often tagged #WLT (We Love Taylor).

Perhaps some day, with enough photos, we could produce curated vernacular ‘type’ tours, whizzing around the streets, learning more about the type and lettering that surrounds us. We might even make an app for that.

Visit WLT World.

Matthew Solle

Worth mentioning if it hasn’t been mentioned before, London Typographica doing something similar for London signage with a recently released app http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ldntypo/id472643840

Mar 6, 2012
johno

Matthew:
Hadn’t seen that. Thanks.

Mar 6, 2012
Matthew Solle

Np

Antony Harrington talked about it at Typo London http://typolondon.com/index.php?node_id=5.49&lang_id=1

Mar 6, 2012
Micky

There’s a kickstarter project about to launch based in the US with a similar theme.
http://kck.st/xIf4Uo

Mar 6, 2012
M. Hartt

Uh… The HighBall is in Austin, Texas, not the middle of the Gulf of Guinea.

But I like the idea for WLT World, even if the geotagging is a “bit” off.

Mar 11, 2012
johno

M. Hartt

A temporary glitch. Fixed now.

Mar 12, 2012
Anamika

Great idea! In Bengal, we have been doing this for a long time, and you can check some of our documentations here: blog.rarh.in

Mar 16, 2012
elearning development

It does look wonderful, intuitive and something we can use on daily bases. I haven’t had a chance to do so previously may be folks like Anamika been doing for a while now.

Mar 27, 2012
Mahabub

thanks for share this post

Mar 28, 2012
Gnarly

I really like the idea of the app. Agree about t.swift and the zoo that may follow. good luck with the collection though.

Mar 28, 2012
Antony

London Typographica is getting some great submissions of found type around London, so thanks to all of you participating. The loss of those beautiful examples of public lettering and type in London pains me, and the idea behind London Typographica was to start documenting where these examples are, before they all disappear!

The added advantage is that it enables us to see how type is changing, like ephemeral examples such as graffiti.

Thanks Matthew for the links to the app, and the website.

Mar 28, 2012
Chris Rogers

God I love this idea!

Apr 6, 2012
shubho

wow! a really good initiative.

Apr 12, 2012