A calligram homage to Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Calligram design by Dylan Roscover

Steve,

here is a calligram for you made with the words of your inventions, visions and inspirational thoughts.

With sincere love and gratitude from all of us designers.

A tribute to women

Today, March 8th 2011, is the centenary celebration of the International Women's Day (1911-2011).

We honor this special day with a gallery of calligrams where the woman, her beauty, strength, passion and force of nature are the main subjects.

Enjoy!

Motherhood and pregnancy

Joni James

Donna Summer

Ben Duarri Screen Prince


Oh, Julie

(detail of the poster for the theatrical show "Il Blues di Malaussene")

Laura Ruggeri


2010 Summer sale season campaign
La Rinascente


Calligram portrait
Leslie Nichols


"Go out"
Advertisement for Woman's Day Magazine, 1953. All rights reserved.
Federico Gene


Advertising poster (70s)
Vichy Water


Advertising poster (60s)
Lempereur


Funny Girl - movie poster (60s)

Have a wonderful trip in 2011!

It was a joy receiving this SMS for best wishes in 2011 from a person who doesn't even know I love calligrams!

And I was surprised to see how the complete calligram of the boat is viewable in my old cellular with a little tiny screen (can you see the scratches?!).

The rest of the message was:

Boarding date: 2011

Destination: Happiness

Luggage: Health, Love and Harmony

Have a wonderful trip!

Very charming best wishes calligram, don't you think? ;-)

Maybe on top of the boat instead of the two L's (in lower case) the artist could put two 1's and the calligram best wishes boat would become even more appropriate for the 2011 best wishes.

We can also call this form of calligram Ascii Art: "a technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard...", says Wikipedia.

Calligrams for sale

See how curvaceous body text is used for these calligrams featured on the tags of the 2010 Summer collection at la Rinascente in Milan, Italy!

Maybe it's becuase they follow very curvaceous feminine bodies?

Maybe it's becuase they follow the 60s' fashion trend for the 2010 Summer?

No matter, the result is very appealing and catchy.

It's always very inspiring to see how the visual communication technique of calligrams is used more frequently for business and marketing.

PS
"sconto" in Italian means "discount"
and "saldi" means "sale"

Time to go... eco!

Carpisa Summer 2010 collection chose to put a calligram in the shape of a tree on its new line Recycled.

In the calligram you can read words like love, nature, recycling, bottle, planet, ecology, bag etc. Carpisa took these words seriously and decided to defend the environment choosing tyvek as a material for its line Recycled.

Tyvek is in fact a fiber obtained by recycled bottles made of PET. It's a breathable membrane without toxic substances and completely recyclable as well.

Have a wonderful trip with your Carpisa Recycled suitcase and... show off your calligram recycled bag!

Interactive calligram

by Rick Ligas

I must confess that I would not ordinarily think of a calligram in terms of search engine results. Laura Ruggeri however would. In fact figuring out how a calligram could effect search engine results was part of Laura's thinking when she set about designing a calligram to celebrate her (first) 25 years as a graphic designer and I am happy that she involved me.

Laura had the idea to create a "25th anniversary" calligram and post it as the home page of her website. At first it sounded straightforward: a block of text describing her projects would spell out the numbers "25" in color, but Laura wanted it to be more than that. In addition to the "25" calligram she also wanted the individual words to be links that showed corresponding examples from her portfolio - and the words would be something that she hoped the search engines would take note of, after all, she intends to be an active graphic designer for another 25 years.

So, with this specification she came to me and asked, "Can I create a square, fill it with text, colorize some of the words to create a 2 and 5 then add links here and there and have them show portfolio images when visitors roll over them? And do it in html and css and have that work in all the browsers?"

Well, I like a challenge so I said, "Ahhh, sure." It took a bit of work in HTML/CSS/JavaScript but the results are what I believe to be the first ever in the world interactive calligram, a calligram that responds to you hovering your mouse over it.

Give it a try on her home page: www.LauraRuggeri.com

There were a number of technical challenges to overcome, as there always are in HTML/CSS/JavaScript. For anyone interested in how we did it just view the page source. All the necessary HTML/CSS/JavaScript is contained in the page. We were able to make it work in recent versions of all the major browsers except FireFox on the Mac. And for that I created a special exception in the JavaScript.

Congratulations to Laura for her first 25 years of design and also for creating what seems to be the first ever interactive calligram.

Rick Ligas

LR Communication Design