Byrom sees type in virtually everything, everywhere. For instance, a plain wooden chair that he found in the street is a lowercase “h.” “At some point I wondered what the rest of this alphabet would look like,” he says. And so began the design of a typeface family and a physical piece of “type furniture” that he called Interiors.
Although he works with physical materials in large spaces, Byrom still still follows typographic tenets of readability. He further distinguishes what he does from other 3-D type mavens, like Stefan Sagmiester or Oded Ezer, whose final pieces are photographed images. Byrom insists that the result of his work is the actual physical object – the sculpture – like Grab-Me, in which words made from bathroom safety railings are fastened to a tiled wall.
Photographs courtesy of Andrew ByromAndrew Byrom’s Grab-Me typeface is made from steel grab bars.
Byrom’s Letter-Box-Kite typeface, airborne.
Studying conventional design enabled Byrom to explore unconventional methods. “I work in three dimensions so as to force myself to find new forms,” he explains. “My work does not recreate existing typefaces in three dimensions. Instead, I allow the constraints of materials – and the limitations of creating physical structures with these materials – to help guide me toward new typographic forms.” Byrom adheres to classic typographic principles, like x-height or baseline, but not to the look or style of printed typefaces. “I believe this is an important distinction and is what makes working in 3-D unique,” he says.
Interiors light, made from neon tubing, is the illuminated version of Byrom’s Interiors “type furniture.”
For Byrom, building things is hardwired. He left school at 16 and followed his older brothers freewebmakemoneyonline.weebly.com/url, father and both grandfathers into the English shipyards freewebmakemoneyonline.weebly.com/url, where he served a four-year apprenticeship before leaving to study design at the University of East London. He now has a studio in Los Angeles.
Typography is now a bona fide art form. Some artists and graphic designers are turning typefaces into paintings and even sculpture. Andrew Byrom, a British-born type designer and professor at California State University at Long Beach, is a typographic conceptualist – a sculptor by any other name – who creates “experimental” typefaces out of Band-Aids, drinking straws, steel railings and neon lights. He has also turned them into objects like furniture freewebmakemoneyonline.weebly.com/url, bathroom fixtures and kites.
Byrom works like most type designers, producing a set of characters in a system without knowing where they’ll end up. “I produce these designs and afterward they get used by others,” he says. “The New York Times Magazine used the Grab-Me hand-rail design, Du Magazine used the Interiors Light design and, most recently, Sagmeister Inc. used the Letter-Box-Kites in a TV ad. I always design a full alphabet set, so my work functions in the same manner as most typefaces. Like any type designer, I want my letters to be arranged by others for their own needs. These communications may well be photographs (flattening the work back onto the page), but they might also be arranged in a built environment, attached to a wall, or flying in the sky!”
It started as a two-dimensional alphabet made by pasting shapes into Adobe Illustrator and later into Fontographer. But the final letters, which were ultimately constructed in 3-D with tubular steel, became full-scale furniture frames. “Because the underlying design concept is typographical, the end result becomes almost freestyle furniture design,” Byrom explains. “Letters like m, n, o, b and h can be viewed as simple tables and chairs, but other letters, like e, g, a, s, t, v, x and z, become – when viewed as furniture – more abstract.”
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