Building Letters Three
In early October 2006, the third issue of Building Letters magazine was published to encourage typographers and designers to help people in need. By purchasing one of the 1,000 hand-numbered copies, those who subscribed to the magazine received a CD with 25 fonts from renowned typographers, but also made a significant contribution to those less fortunate in life.
Shortly after publishing the call for collaboration on the third issue, we offered the initiator of the project, Jim Richardson from the UK, that we would graphically design and layout the entire issue free of charge; Jim immediately accepted the offer. The first version of the magazine was ready in February 2005, but unfortunately various setbacks stalled the project for over a year and a half. Eventually Richardson and I agreed that Designiq would handle the completion of the magazine and its distribution. The international team that helped the magazine see the light of day met shortly afterwards at the Typo Berlin 2006 conference.
The Building Letters magazine is entirely set in Tomáš Brousil’s Botanika🔗 font with an alternative version of the letter E, which refers to the numeral 3
The content of the third issue of Building Letters, thematically focused on Sri Lanka and Thailand, includes interesting contributions by Tom de Gay🔗, Nick Shinn🔗, Max Kisman🔗, Fiona Ross🔗 and Donald Beekman🔗. It includes a CD with 25 free fonts provided by Pieter van Rosmalen🔗, Seonil Yun, José Scaglione🔗, David Březina🔗, José Louis Coyotl Mixcoatl🔗, Stefan Hattenbach🔗, Bram Pitoyo🔗, Tomáš Brousil🔗, Richard Kegler🔗, Veronika Burian🔗, Jürgen Weltin🔗 and Ludmila Lorenz🔗. All fonts are in OpenType format and, with one exception, contain characters for all European languages written in Latin script (the complete Unicode block Latin Extended A), including Maltese, Welsh or Esperanto; some fonts contain special features such as alternate and decorative characters, digit variants, ligatures or small capitals.
Building Letters were selected for the exhibition at the Brno Biennial 2008🔗, where viewers could browse through each publication
The A5 sized magazine has 64 colour pages, is published in English in a limited edition of 1,000 hand-numbered copies and was on sale for €35. All profits from the sale of the magazine, less actual costs – over ten thousand dollars – were donated to the renowned charity Direct Relief International🔗, which used the money to help people affected by the 2004 tsunami.