Alphabets: Just as Nigel was nearing the end of his stay in San Francisco in 2004, he took the initiative of creating a photographic alphabet collection poster as a way, in retrospect, of saying goodbye.
pon returning to his native Bristol, UK, he did a similar exercise with iconic letterforms well-known to Bristol locals. In a similar vein, Nigel produced a poster with all 124 permissible two-letter words in the game Scrabble.
Trips across the world have led to many collections of photographs featuring type, lettering, and typography. As a result, projects personal and professional have resulted as a direct response to the messages and compositions found. A last example given was a piece of stenciled street art that carried a vaguely familiar lyric. This welcome tension led to a series of posters with similarly chosen lyrics designed to create in the beholder the same foggy search for a distant memory.
Nigel French
A former resident of the beautiful city of San Francisco, Nigel French is currently based in England, from whence he hails and where he works as a freelance graphic designer, trainer, and aspiring artist. His obsession with photographing type, especially mid-century American signage, seems to be getting worse. Lately he has taken to organizing his images into themed books and posters.
Nigel is the author of a book about Photoshop that no one reads and InDesign Type: Professional Typography with Adobe InDesign (Adobe Press), as well more than twenty titles in the Lynda.com online training library. He also writes a type-related column for InDesign Magazine.
By David Sudweeks
