Somewhere between Cowboy Carter, a machine shop, and an X-ray, I found an alphabet.
I was interested in the strange visual territory where Western Americana starts to feel almost futuristic: polished metal, leather, hardware, machinery, a little rhinestone, a little swagger. Cowboy Carter’s reimagining of the Western felt like a particularly good excuse to lean into that world—not as nostalgia, but as something theatrical, stylized, and a little strange.
Then there were machines: all those wonderful forms that exist somewhere between function and ornament. Bolts, bends, tubes, plates, handles, things that look like they could either do something important or absolutely nothing.
And X-rays offered the opposite way of looking at an object. Instead of celebrating the surface, they let you see through it. Structure becomes image. Something solid becomes almost weightless.
I started wondering what would happen if those three ideas were applied to typography.
The letters became things to fabricate rather than things to draw. I stretched them, folded them, bent them, layered them, and let them get a little unruly. Some became heavy and mechanical; others almost disappeared into their own structure.
The goal wasn’t to make a better alphabet. It was to see what happened when familiar letters were given a little more metal, machinery, and myth.
Heavy Met-alphabet is what happened when typography got a little out of hand.
- Client
- Self-intiated Personal Project
- Year
- 2022
- Skills & Tools
- typography, lettering
