Lettermatch
The assisting inspirational
website for monogram-design.
website for monogram-design.
Side note: The layout-possibilities are restricted on behance.
Many graphic designers spend a lot of time in collecting inspirational typographic works on websites like pinterest. One special subject of typography are monograms, which preserve exciting and inspirational typographic ideas.
Inspirational collections can be considered as working tools for graphic designers. If you get stuck with your creative process you can just jump over to your inspirational board to get your eyes on your already preselected inspiraton.
However if you are using your inspiration-board for monogram-design you will notice that not every monogram-idea is applicable on every letter-combination. Which letters can be used for a certain monogram-idea depends on the individual geometry each letter has. For example monogram-ideas with the rectangular letter E in use can be often transfered on geometric related letters like the F, but at first glance not on the circular letter O.
However in most cases the geometric conditions of exciting monogram-inspirations are often not easy to spot so it’s hard to tell with ease with monogram-ideas from one’s inspiration-board may be useful for inspiration or not.
This challenge is aggravated by the circumstance that there isn’t just one recognizeable letterform, but dozens different kind of letterforms. That means if you pick an alternate letterform for the letter O that is rectangular, the letter may be finally applicable on monogram-ideas requiring a rectangular shape.
With this insight I imagined a monogram-inspiration-tool that relieves the designer from this work and provides a search interface that finds applicable monogram-ideas after the user entered your monogram-letters. This fictitous monogram-inspiration-website (“Lettermatch”) was the topic of my bachelor-thesis.
Monograms shown on this project-page aren’t my property. Monograms owned by other copyright holders are used here under the guidelines of the Fair Use provisions.
PERSONAL FAVORITES
My interest in monogram-design comes from my enthusiasm for typography and letterforms. It’s joyful and inspiring to observe all of the smart typographic solutions to combine 2 letters.
Alternate Letterforms
Alternate letterforms play an important role in monogram-design. Every monogram-idea requires different geometric conditions (e.g. roundness = U, …; diagonals A, …) as you can see in the examples below. For example if the letter A was given for a monogram-design the traditional triangular letterform of an A would be only adaptable to those monogram-ideas that can cope with triangularity.
However there isn’t just one recognizable letterform for each letter of the latin alphabet. Letterforms that differ from the archetype-letterform are called alternate letterforms. That way an A can be also drawn roundish. As a result the letter A can finally cope with roundish monogram-ideas. By exploring alternate letterforms you will find more common ground between two letters allowing you to come up with more ideas to design a monogram.
LETTER-CHARACTERISTICS EXAMPLES
As explained above alternate letterforms have a huge impact on the versatility. Nonetheless each letter of the latin alphabet has its own distinguishing basic form. For this reason every letter does have it’s very own special features for monogram design as shown in the examples below:
MONOGRAM ANALYSIS
Every smart monogram takes advantage of the special geometric shapes of the monogram’s letters. However I was curios which letters of the alphabet may also be also suitable for the very same monogram-idea. For this purpose I designed analysis-sheets to analyze monograms from my collection to explore which letters are suitable for the same idea.
WHAT’S THE ANALYSIS FOR?
This analysis can be applied on any inspirational monogram. After analyzing a big number of monograms, the database can be used to provide a search interface that only showcases monogram-ideas that are in fact applicable on the searched monogram’s letters.
Furthermore the database does also attach fitting letterforms to the monogram-inspiration. As you can see in the slider below, all of this monograms (CO, RC, BC, RB) have been registered as possible monogram-ideas for the letter-combination K+C.
(Jump to my website to browse through the slider-gallery)
Monogram-Categories
To structure the contents of my monogram-library, I had to come up with a classification-system for monograms to ensure clarity for the user.
There are indeed already plenty of systems to organize logos (especially in logo-books). However those systems are rarely dedicated only to monograms. While authors of logo-design books need flexible systems applicable on all kind of logos, I was able to make a narrower ranged classification-system exclusively for monograms.
While most category-terms were adopted from great logo-books like Logo Modernism, Logo (The Reference Guide to Symbols and Logotypes) or Modern Monograms anyway, the most work was actually done by declaring clear category definitions plus creating a sub-category system.
Jump to my website to browse through the slider-gallery …
MONOGRAM SUBCATEGORIES
Website
The website is divided in three parts. My project’s goal was to achieve a tool for the monogram design-process (“Lettermatch”). To put idea into effect I had to collect a lot of letterforms and monograms. I realized that these collections building up the monogram-tool may be also interesting without the purpose of designing a monogram. For this reason I also designed two collection-pages for alternate letterforms and monograms.
1. Lettermatch (DEMO)
1. Lettermatch (EXTENDED intro animation)
2. Letterforms (DEMO)
2. Letterforms (EXTENDED intro animation)
3. MONOGRAMS (DEMO)
3. Monograms (Extended intro animation)
FAQ
When is Lettermatch going to be published? This project is a castle in the air. I picked this concept for my bachelor-thesis to explore a special field in typography and to improve my webdesign-skills (and having fun). It would be nice if this website was real, but the estimated expenses for realization and maintenance are way too high.
Where are the monograms from? Many monograms were scanned from books like Logo Modernism, Logo (The Reference Guide to Symbols and Logotypes) or Modern Monograms. Numerous monograms were also collected from pinterest.
Aren’t monograms old-fashioned?
If you are browsing through new released monogram-books you will notice that most printed off monograms were designed 40 years ago. So this assumption can’t be that wrong. However there is a new monogram-design going on the last five years. Most brands and graphic agencies realized how important it is to have a logo that can be displayed efficiently in a square since all social media networks (facebook, youtube, twitter, …) are using this aspect-ratio.
