Seizing St. Patrick’s Day as a green-and-gold opportunity, we’ll be profiling a few Irish and Ireland-based Dribbblers over the next week.
Type is the best supporting actor of design; letterforms and typography are subtle, powerful players crucial to a project’s success, but often underestimated by an uneducated audience. In her weekly poster series Meagan’s Movie Alphabet, designer, illustrator, and hand-letterer Meagan Hyland promotes typography to the level of marquee actor.
In the series, which she started a year ago “to create a fun brief with no client to please but myself,” Hyland designs wonderfully conceived letters to convey a movie’s narrative soul. Take “A is for Across the Universe,” the first letter in Hyland’s cinematic primer.
Beatles music propels the plot of the 2007 Oscar-nominated romantic drama, about star-crossed lovers (Hey) Jude and Lucy (in the Sky with Diamonds), played by Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood.
“The design itself is a play on one of the key motifs from the movie … which is a big painted strawberry,” Hyland told Dribbble. “It is still one of my favorite letters because once I had the design, I thought, ‘well, it would be silly to do just one.’”
Thank goodness for the letter A. Hyland’s series has garnered her acclaim from the likes of Glamour and Flavorwire, and has become an important component of Hyland’s creative work.
Not surprisingly, Hyland goes typographic when naming a Dribbble favorite: Friends of Type, a group of US-based designers who post daily lettering exercises to an online sketchbook. “Working with type a lot, I always find their work exciting to see develop,” Hyland said.
When not alphabetizing, Hyland works as a graphic designer at Dublin-based Catalysto. Originally from Kildare, about 60km/35mi from Dublin, Hyland has found her own favorite haunts in the capital city, on the Southside: “Watching old movies in the IFI [Irish Film Institute], people watching in St. Stephen’s Green [a Victorian-era public park], and rummaging for records on Wicklow Street.
“Dublin is a great city for finding new music and art, and there is always a pop-up gallery or a gig somewhere in the city.”
As for St. Paddy’s, Hyland’s “keeping it simple with pints and the parade with my friends from art school in Limerick.”
Hyland can be found online at meaganhyland.com and meagansmoviealphabet.tumblr.com, and on Twitter @meaganhyland.
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