body/type

I came across this letter B and thought it was a particularly lovely example of body typography. Whereas you might normally see people posing as letters (like Hijack Your Life's Backbreaker) here, we have people wearing letters. It's part of a typographic experiment from Sweedish designers RBG6 and if you click through to their site you can see other letters, and even watch those letters play soccer, but for me the B is the most compelling, both as a letterform and as an image.

Not only is this young woman wearing her letter, she seems to somehow embody it: The bun in her hair echoing the bulges of the B; her straight, almost rigid posture, reinforced by the black tights and heels; her arms trapped within the construction where the B's counters (the holes within the bulges) would otherwise be. Nice.

Then, in researching this post, I found Lift (London International Festival of Theatre) and the lower set of images at left. It's called The People's Alphabet, and is an alphabet composed entirely of photo booth pictures of different people enacting the given letter. Initiated by designer Paul Elliman, it was posted year and a half ago. I haven't found more information on it yet, but I found this line on the Lift site rather intriguing: The People's Alphabet is open for anyone to take part. So get creative and make a letter, as clearly or as obscurely as you like.

You could have dozens of e's, a handful of d's, a couple q's, etcetera -- All of different people with different ideas about how to make the letter, yet the visual style of the photo booth shots keeps them tied together as a "typeface". And though obviously you're not going to write out long sentences with letters like these, I do think they can be an interesting approach for shorter words:

Not sure if the lowercase letters below each photo come from Elliman or Lift, but where I initially thought they were sort of cop out for not having the photos easily "readable", I actually think their presence makes you look more closely at the people above.