Alphabetical Playground: Nigel Cottier’s abstract letterforms

Alphabetical Playground, Nigel Cottier, published by Slanted

(Image credit: Nigel Cottier / Slanted)

This new book explores the fringes of experimental typography, taking into account the dynamic range that can be eked out of modern lettering when technology-induced variations are spliced with traditional techniques.

Slanted

Alphabet Playground by Nigel Cottier

Alphabetical Playground has been created and designed by the typographer Nigel Cottier and published by German graphic specialist Slanted. Cottier describes it as an ‘investigation into how we can use the alphabet as a container for countless graphic systems, conceptual ideas, and endless play’.

A spread from Alphabetical Playground, Nigel Cottier — A spread from *Alphabetical Playground*, Nigel Cottier

Starting with a foreword by the designer Hamish Muir, one of the co-founders of 8vo and the agency MuirMcNeill, the new book follows on from Cottier’s 2021 publication, the monumental Letterform Variations (also published through Slanted).

Cottier, who also runs the excellent @Process.Pattern Instagram, is a designer and experimental typographer with a wide range of commercial experience as well as an ongoing interest in discovering patterns, forms and new approaches to type design via programming, code and formulae. His day job is design director at brand design agency Accept & Proceed, where he has overseen major projects for clients such as Nasa, Rapha, Apple, BMW, Google and Nike – an impressive array of creative early-21st-century mega-corps.

The new monograph is a chronicle of Cottier’s graphical experiments, starting with the basic building blocks of the alphabet filtered through the concept of variable type and idealised letterform typologies. The end result is a rich visual journey through the sheer diversity of creative expression designers have at their fingertips using a solely typographic approach.

‘Ultimately – although it may not always be immediately apparent – everything on these pages is language,’ Cottier writes. ‘This work demonstrates how text allows us to embed our thoughts, beliefs and systems within it: a code within a code, a game within a game, a system within a system.’

Alphabetical Playground, Nigel Cottier, Slanted Publishers, €35, AlphabeticalPlayground.com, @Process.Pattern, Slanted.de, @Slanted_Publishers

Jonathan Bell has written for Wallpaper* magazine since 1999, covering everything from architecture and transport design to books, tech and graphic design. He is now the magazine’s Transport and Technology Editor. Jonathan has written and edited 15 books, including Concept Car Design, 21st Century House, and The New Modern House. He is also the host of Wallpaper’s first podcast.