title: Lettering Large: The Art and Design of Monumental Typography
author:  Steven Heller 
description: Heller and his co-author Mirko Ili look at the diverse ways that artists and architects are using monumental typography in buildings, sculptures, and outdoor displays. It might seem curious to think of type as an art, they write in the book's introduction, noting that letters have traditionally been used more for practical than aesthetic purposes. But as you can see in the book and the images below, type is evocative apart from any particular message it might carry. In some buildings, like Ogijimas Soul in Japan (third image, below) three-dimensional type is used to create an irregular, appealing lattice form. In others, two-dimensional printed lettering creates a sense of frenetic intellectual activity, as if to say what's going on in this building is so turbo-charged, ideas are actually condensing onto the walls. <b><i>The Boston Globe</i>Brainiac</b><br /><br />From inscriptions on Mesopotamian temples to the street art of 21st-century Brooklyn, man has been scrawling words and symbols on walls for millennia. It's that very urge that's chronicled in the new book Lettering Large, a global survey of what co-author Steven Heller calls extroverted typography. <b><i>The Wall Street Journal</i></b><br /><br />Big type used to be known as Supergraphics, a high visibility offshoot from late period modernism when the building started evolving into a billboard. But where the Supergraphic genre was brash and commercial, the more artistic expressions of big scale type design are rarely chronicled. <i>Lettering Large</i> corrects the balance, assembling a huge overview of installations, inscriptions and artworks that use the power of the printed work to make their point. Whether letters are cut, carved, painted or punched, the book looks at ways in which typography and the built (and natural) environments have come together, with new works supported by plenty of historical precedents. <b><i>Wallpaper</i></b><br /><br />While carving a sign from a slab of marble or slapping supergraphics on the side of a building is nothing new, a recent boom in techniques like computer-aided milling and large-format printing has aided the ability of artists and designers to see their characters writ largelike, really, really large. The book traces the history of letterforms in the urban landscape, from rune stones to architectural signage to oversized corporate logos to entire buildings made from type, including massive sculptures of laser-cut paper lyrics that float in the wind. <b>Gizmodo</b><br /><br />Like these words youre reading now, we typically experience typography at a scale of only a few millimeters. Across our built environment, however, type stands tall, even monumental. These mammoth words fascinated Steven Heller and Mirko Ili. The duo documented hundreds of examples writ large in art and architecture and delved into societys collective interest in tall type. <b>Designers and Books</b>
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  * * *
  
  # A Victim of Circumstances
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### George Gissing
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
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  ### I
  
  
  
  
  
    
  In the summer of 1869, an artist, whose wanderings had led him far
  
  
  into rural England, rambled one sunny morning about the town of
  
  
  Glastonbury. Like all but a very few Englishmen, he cared little for
  
  
  the ancient history of his land: Avalon was a myth that did not speak
  
  
  to his imagination, and the name of Dunstan echoed but faint