Volume 9–2 (Low Res).pdf

18
While it is legendary that
little girls cover their eyes
and scream at the sight of
spiders and such,Katherine
Heller has always thought
bugs were fascinating and
fun.Still,she was not prepared
for the agony they
would cause her when she
set out to design an insect
alphabet.lt was her senior
independent study project
at the University of Wisconsin,where
she concentrated
on Advertising Design and
Illustration.
Quite logically, she started
with A, assembling the character
from body parts of a
dragonfly. When she got to
B, it seemed reasonable to
work with bees. From there,
the idea of using the insect
whose initial letter corresponded
to each letter of
the alphabet seemed to
make very good sense. So C
for caterpillar followed,and
then came D for dragonfly,
F for flies, G for grasshopper,
I for ichneumon,L for lice,
M for moth,manthis, mayfly
and mosquito,0 for orchard
spider, P for paper wasps,Y
for yellowjackets, U for
underwing of a moth.
But in spite of painstaking
research,some letters defied
her plan. For E,H,N,QgX
and z she had to combine
specimens or introduce elements
of the environment
to make the letterforms
work.Besides these pictorial
considerations,the major
design problems—composition,scale,tonality
and overall
unity of the alphabet had
to be solved.Although she
had resolved that her major
concern was with the illustration,
not the functional
aspects of the letters, her
complicated capitals turned
out to be amazingly legible.
If it's any comfort to Ms.
Heller, nobody would ever
guess the agonizing that
went into this project,considering
how easy-on-theeye
is the result. M.M.
Capitalizing n Insects