Many graph­ic design­ers spend a lot of time 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 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 inspiration.

If you are look­ing for inspi­ra­tion par­tic­u­lar­ly for a mono­gram-design, things are dif­fer­ent. If you spot a mono­gram in your inspi­ra­tion col­lec­tion that fits the style you are look­ing for, it’s not unlike­ly that the monogram’s con­cept can’t be applied on the giv­en let­ters of your mono­gram project.

The ques­tion 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 trans­ferred on geo­met­ri­cal­ly relat­ed let­ters like the F, but not on the cir­cu­lar let­ter O.

In most cas­es, the geo­met­ric require­ments of excit­ing mono­gram-inspi­ra­tions are often not easy to spot. So it’s hard to tell with ease whether 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 let­ter­form for each char­ac­ter of the alpha­bet, but dozens of dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions called let­ter­forms. This means if you pick an alter­nate let­ter­form for the let­ter O that is rec­tan­gu­lar, the let­ter may be sud­den­ly applic­a­ble on mono­gram-ideas requir­ing a rec­tan­gu­lar shape.

With this insight, I imag­ined a mono­gram inspi­ra­tion tool pro­vid­ing a search inter­face that finds applic­a­ble mono­gram-ideas once the user entered the two let­ters of his mono­gram project.

This fic­ti­tious mono­gram inspi­ra­tion web­site (“Let­ter­match”) was the top­ic of my bach­e­lor thesis.

To com­bine two let­ters, one has to fig­ure the geo­met­ric char­ac­ter­is­tics both let­ters are shar­ing. Exam­ples: round­ness (O, C, …), tri­an­gu­lar­i­ty (V, W, …) or loops (B, P, …). These exam­ples are based on arche­type let­ter­forms. Luck­i­ly there isn’t only one recog­nis­able let­ter­form for each let­ter of the Latin alpha­bet. Those vari­a­tions from a letter’s tra­di­tion­al skele­ton are called alter­nate letterforms.

Once I start­ed ana­lyz­ing mono­grams, I learned that alter­nate let­ter­forms play an out­stand­ing role in mono­gram design. To rec­og­nize the let­ter A is doesn’t need to be nec­es­sar­i­ly tri­an­gu­lar. An alter­nate ver­sion, drawn roundish, of the let­ter A will be read as an A as well. As a result, the let­ter A can sud­den­ly cope with roundish mono­gram-ideas. By explor­ing alter­nate let­ter­forms, you will find more sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two let­ters allow­ing you to come up with more ideas to design a monogram.

let­ter-char­ac­ter­is­tics examples

As explained above alter­nate let­ter­forms have an enor­mous impact on the ver­sa­til­i­ty. Nev­er­the­less, each let­ter has it’s very own unique 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. I designed analy­sis sheets to analyse mono­grams from my col­lec­tion. I did check which let­ter com­bi­na­tions can be com­bined the very same way as the mono­gram inspiration.

Logo: This ser­vice pro­vid­ed by the web­site remind­ed me of a but­ler, who serves only the best inspi­ra­tional mono­grams for the user. There­for this metaphor got used as logo (LM = Lettermatch).

Web­site

Web­site Structure

The web­site is divid­ed into three parts. My project’s goal was to achieve a tool for the mono­gram design-process (“Let­ter­match”). To put the idea into effect, I had to col­lect a lot of let­ter­forms and mono­grams. I real­ized that these col­lec­tions build­ing up the mono­gram-tool might also be inter­est­ing with­out the pur­pose of design­ing a mono­gram. For this rea­son, I also cre­at­ed two col­lec­tion pages for alter­nate let­ter­forms and monograms.

Web­site-Struc­ture of the Lettermatch-Page

The fol­low­ing video demon­strates what’s going on after the user has entered two let­ters in the search inter­face. The gen­er­a­tive mono­gram-inspi­ra­tion-page is divid­ed into two parts:

AAlternate Letterforms for Letter 1 / Letter 2
For the mono­gram design process, it’s very help­ful to know about a wide range of alter­nate let­ter­forms. For this rea­son, the user gets pre­sent­ed a lot of alter­nate let­ter­forms to dis­cov­er sim­i­lar­i­ties between his both letters.

BApplic­a­ble mono­grams for inspiration
The core of the web­site is the mono­grams-data­base. Every sug­gest­ed mono­gram on this page is applic­a­ble on the user’s mono­gram let­ters. How the tool is sup­posed to be used is shown below.

BInfor­ma­tion
Get all nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion about the alter­nate letterform.

CFont-Alter­nates
Find­ing dif­fer­ent fonts that are using a cer­tain alternate-letterform.

ADis­cov­er­ing
The fil­ter-menu for the mono­gram-cat­e­gories allows you to dis­cov­er the dif­fer­ences between the categories.

BResearch
Find mono­grams match­ing your let­ters or search for a sin­gle let­ter to dis­cov­er the letter’s unique features.

CPar­tic­i­pa­tion
Users can add new mono­grams to the col­lec­tion. If they ful­fill the qual­i­ty cri­te­ria, they will be added.