At the tail end of September last year I announced the Type-Tart Card contest organised by St Bride Library and Plus International design festival in collaboration with Type. Graphic designers – from up-and-coming new talent to established names – were invited to "find the tart hiding in every type and create their own graphic numbers". A selection of the entries can be found in the 21st Century Sex issue of Wallpaper*, and all 450 typographic tart cards are on display in a gallery on the Wallpaper* website. The collection is will be exhibited at KK Outlet, London from Monday 22nd to 29th June. Click here to download the invite.
Chelsea College (17 of 17) | A nice play on the origins of Courier.
Loran Stosskopf | Never thought a simple set of punctuation marks could be so explicit.
The type-tart cards are of wildly varying quality – from tired old clichés over mildly funny to deliciously witty or even outright explicit. The graphic style is equally eclectic, with some designs mimicking the crude, punk-like language of photocopied tart cards, while others resemble the glossy quality of contemporary high-end designs. Some attempts at wordplay fall short of the mark, while others are clever puns on both typographical terminology and the more racy language of porn and prostitution. The best achieve maximum effect with minimal means. The examples where parts of characters were customised into literal representations of genitals are quite poor and unimaginative, but I was amazed at how confrontational the purely typographic cards are, and marvelled at the unease I felt when examining what in fact simply are symmetrically arranged glyphs. Of course 450 cards are a bit much to discuss, but I made a small selection of cards that struck me for one reason or another.
Andrew Sutton | Fun play of words with "dominatrix" and FF Dot Matrix Grid
Ajda Rotar (01 of 02) | FF Extra is indeed one of the most extreme extra bold type designs around.
John Fairley (05 of 05) | Reference to both the typographic term and the BDSM practice.
Verena Gerlach (02 of 02) | A beautiful design with FF Chambers Sans by the designer herself.
Clusta (01 of 02) | Clever reference to the dubious origins of the Helvetica clone Arial, with a cameo by Baskerville.
Black and Ginger (03 of 03) | Witty wordplay with Rockwell.
Howard Marsden (01 of 03) | Too stylish for a tart card, but a nice use of Trade Gothic altogether.
Pete Hall | A perfect marriage of a curvalicious ampersand and curvaceous bodies.
Form, Becky Johnson | Could this use of Fontsmith's FS Lola be a reference to Copacabana, the famous Barry Manilow song?
Nick Greenwood | Cooper Black's voluptuous shapes provided plenty of inspiration for many type-tart card submissions…
Form, Will Martin | … as did the rounded extra bold character shapes of Gusto for this one.
FSNM (11 of 12) | Raunchy multiple readings with Fry's Baskerville / Baskerville Old Face.
Jack Siddons | Playing off the age of Aldo Novarese's ubiquitous Eurostile.
FSNM (12 of 12) | Arial provided almost as much inspiration as did Helvetica, but this one's particularly witty.
Jason Church (01 of 03) | Simple and funny.
Tom Browning | Elaborate concept to integrate the ITC Lubalin Graph name in an explicit message…
John Fairley (03 of 05) | … and a somewhat simpler one for Pump Triline.
Header image:Type-tart card by Darren Scott, using the original Kabel – yup, designed by Koch, first name Rudolf (not Rudolph; he ain't got no red nose).
