Designer Sanny Winters (1975) is strict with herself when it comes to letters. She has created a ‘love alphabet’, in which she represents a word from the shape of each letter, creating a scene that has something to do with love. A letter, even as part of an ornamental alphabet, must be legible.
Initially, Winters says, you have to see a letter and recognize it as a letter. And then, as the eye lingers, the image reveals itself. The letter F, for example, depicts a gentle embrace of first love (first love). Two contrasting figures interlock in the O of ‘opposites‘. Two figures fly at each other in the H of ‘horny‘.
Limits
Winters is also strict in her use of color, or she makes clear agreements with herself. She starts in black and white and then creates the shape, because the letters must also work without color, reveal their story. And then she chooses the colors. Not too much. In the case of her ‘love alphabet’: red, black and white. The limitations she imposes on herself in her design make it interesting for her, she says. She does it more often, the letter as the basis for an image. For example in her publication Belgium Xtra Bold (2014), a cultural sketch of Belgium and the Belgians in typographic images.
She does have favorite letters in the alphabet. The A always appeals to the imagination, she says, and she likes the symmetry of the S. Maybe she will make a book from the letters.
It is quite important, Winters thinks, in this day and age, where everything is negative and there is a lot of disagreement, to talk again about what actually unites us. Love, that is. Because in the end, when everything falls away, that’s what’s left, she says. And that is the same everywhere. That is the reason, says Winters, for this alphabet.