‘Texture’ by C. Reimer

‘Texture’

by C. Reimer

‘Vegetable’ by C. Reimer

‘Vegetable’

by C. Reimer

Interesting through its multiple textural layers and colourful illustrations, this mural must have belonged to a fruits and vegetable shop. The illustrations show fruits, cherries, pineapple, bananas and others, although the letters almost spell the word ‘vegetable’ – (Gemüse in German – the first letter ‘G’ is missing).

‘Mitte Prenzlauer Berg’ by N. Haedrich

‘Mitte Prenzlauer Berg’

by N. Haedrich

‘Frankfurt/O. Lichtenberg’ by N. Haedrich

‘Frankfurt/O. Lichtenberg’

by N. Haedrich

‘Kinzig street’ by M. Sattler

‘Kinzig street’

by M. Sattler

For maximum clarity and legibility, most streetsigns around the world use modernist, sans-serif typefaces. These were first developed during the 1920es when Modernism proposed that ‘ornament is crime’ and ‘form follows function’.

Where earlier typefaces were more or less based on calligraphy, with varying width of stroke and ‘serifs’, or nonstructural elements still based on Roman letterforms, the new ‘sans-serif’ typefaces reject all unneccessary shapes as wasteful.

‘Revolutionary movement’ by F. Silge

‘Revolutionary movement’

by F. Silge

‘Become active in your local revolutionary movement’ – based on the old woodcut technique of printing, this piece of street art proposes activism on a grassroots level. Although there is no specification as to which type of revolutionary movement should be joined, the style could be reminiscent of socialist propaganda from the 1950es. All letters are lowercase and thus follow the Bauhaus typography experiments from the 1920es which, as opposed to other Bauhaus design ideas, never made it into the mainstream.

‘Buried in concrete’ by F. Silge

‘Buried in concrete’

by F. Silge

‘Books second hand’ by K. Windhorst

‘Books second hand’

by K. Windhorst

The German Alphabet has four extra letters: Ö [œ], Ä [æ], Ü [y], which are called ‘Umlaut’ and ß [s], which is a ligature replacing a double ‘s’, which is a stressed ‘s’ in the German language. Old German fraktur typefaces are difficult to read because apart from the ß, they also contain other letters unfamiliar today, like the ligature s; they also don’t differentiate between the lower case J and I.

‘No Logo’ by F. Silge

‘No Logo’

by F. Silge

‘Jungle Fever’ by F. Silge

‘Jungle Fever’

by F. Silge