Public lettering in London

I am a typography guy. As such, it is my self-appointed job to evangelize whenever possible on the beauty of typefaces and their various fonts. (For those of you who use those terms interchangeably, you ought to know that a typeface is a design for a set of characters, while a font is a combination of typeface, size, pitch, and spacing. For example, Helvetica is a typeface that defines the shape of each character. Within Helvetica, however, there are several fonts from which to choose—different sizes, bold, italic, small caps, etc.)

In 1997, an instructor named Phil Baines developed a city walk for his London-based graphic design students. This walk focuses mainly on larger examples of public lettering and doesn't really go in for what he called "incidentals," but it's still quite the project. If you've ever been to London and had a chance to walk around, you will recognize a few of the stops on the tour. If you haven't been there, I suggest you stop reading this and call your travel agent right now.