Gràfica de les Rambles: The Signs of Barcelona

Beautiful book. All photos, and offers a unique view of the city. We used as a guestbook at our wedding!

A more-than-worthy jewel in Louise Fili's crown, this beautiful/stylish book is a wonderful follow-up to her previous 2 books on international signage.We can only hope that she keeps going and going and going. My advice: Don't put this book up on a shelf. Keep it out on a favoritetabletop, and just flip through when you want a blast of design acumen. From commanding block letters that communicate with brio -- tocurvaceous swirling italics........Now add elegant mosaics, carved eternal limestone, colorful stained glass, and eye-popping neon......It's allhere. Beautiful savvy photos, GREAT page design a la Fili, and just enough text to sweeten the pot of this visual feast.Typography mavens will be push-overs for this book -- but this engaging volume will enroll ANY one into the love of beautiful letter forms.Excellent!

Travel, typography and signage is what unites certain graphic designers or typophiles the world over, especially when it comes to social media posts or personal photo albums. Having a visual collection of unique typographic signs in a keepsake book keeps the love of these pieces well and alive, at least in photographic terms. For the over past 40 years, New York art director & designer Louise Fili has made it her creative mission—armed with camera, tripod and comfy walking shoes—to travel throughout her favourite cities and capture the typographic beauty she’s found before they are lost to the elements of weather, nature or man itself.With design support from her team of talented designers, this third book in a series showcases the beauty that Barcelona streets have to offer. While previous volumes covered the typographic signage of Paris & Italy, this one takes a closer look the distinctive qualities of this Catalan city by the sea. Broken into sections covering modernist, art deco, cursive lettering, and mosaics to monograms, architectural and eclectic, each image allows the viewer to really focus on the nuances and details of each piece of typography. Many are original type styles or letterforms giving it a distinctive uniqueness like no other.A lovely story introduces “Grafica de les Rambles”, explaining how the previous books were created out of a sense of urgency, to visually capture these incredible typographic artworks before they vanished completely. She continued on with Barcelona, mapping out her trip using Google Street View but was devastated when one of her favourite shop fronts was seemingly erased minutes before her arrival. Fortunately, through her personal account being shared in the news, an email from a family member of the shop was able to easily reinstall the sign (removed for safety reasons after the photo studio closed the year before) upon her return to the city. Fili documented the reinstallation of the exquisite typography, with 15 proud family members in front of the location as a tribute to them and the many other small businesses who managed to keep the city’s historic signage alive.That is what this wonderful series is all about…keeping what was once lost or at risk of being erased, and bringing it to life again for past, present and future generations. I discovered other countries (e.g. Japan) doing similar publications, but not on the same visual scale and attention that Louise Fili has taken. I look forward to her next edition and am thankful to all who continue to document the beauty they discover, wherever in the world they find them themselves.