Lettering Large

Typography has jumped off the printed page to stand on its own as branding, sculpture, and even architecture. Lettering Large examines this phenomenon through a diverse collection of images collected from a vast range of sources around the world. As technology has made construction and production of monumental letters possible, the demand for their design has grown exponentially. This book is the first to chronicle letters as presences in the urban landscape. Preeminent graphic design and typographic commentator and historian Steve Heller teams with Mirko Ilić, a noted graphic designer, to select the most dramatic and telling examples culled from sites across the United States and throughout Europe and Asia.

“From inscriptions on Mesopotamian temples to the street art of 21st-century Brooklyn, man has been scrawling words and symbols on walls for millennia. It’s that very urge that’s chronicled in the new book Lettering Large, a global survey of what co-author Steven Heller calls ‘extroverted typography.’” —The Wall Street Journal

Steven Heller is the 2011 recipient of the Smithsonian National “Design Mind” Award. He is the co-chair of the MFA Design/Designers as Author + Entrepreneur program at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the editor and/or co-author of more than 140 books on design and popular culture. He writes The Daily Heller blog and is a columnist for The Atlantic online and the New York Times Book Review.

Mirko Ilić has collaborated with both Milton Glaser and Steven Heller as co-author on multiple books and as a teacher at Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts.