MacGuffin #13 – THE LETTER

‘The Letter’ does not relate to the alphabet alone but to language, to code, to gestures, to media, and more. The letter is a magical symbol, and at the same time a very ordinary thing. It is embedded in specific culture and dependent on the reproduction technologies available at the time. The context is what makes it interesting: the letter is created, used, discarded, forgotten, and (sometimes) revived. Find out about the history of Scrabble, embracing graffiti, how humans perform letters, the culture of protest letters, the meaning of memes, typography that resists the domination of Western typefaces, the narrow binarity of the French language, the left-handed experience, and more.

MacGuffin is a new and unusual design & crafts magazine. It features fabulous stories about the life of ordinary, often anonymously designed things. Each biannual edition takes an object and explores the manifold stories it generates.