Feb 11, 2009

Pangram Illustrated

Love this work from Dutch (?) artist Erosie. Graphic designers will probably recognize what this is about at first glance...


For all the others that may have not idea what this is about let's start by explaining what a pangram is. A pangram (from the Greek: pan gramma, "every letter"), is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Pangrams are used to display typefaces and the pangram portrayed here "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is one of the most popular ones because it was utilized by Western Union to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment and is now used by a number of computer programs (most notably the font viewer built into Microsoft Windows) to display computer fonts. The other thing that makes this one popular is that is relatively short and "makes sense" as a sentence.

Because of this use as some kind of "font test", designers, copywriters and creative directors tend to know this phrase by heart. To see it in a comic style, graffitti-like illustration just made me laugh.

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