BTC Find and Seek
Bad Type Club · 37 Students across two sections of Typography 1 · 2025
A free family of 38 typefaces assembled from found lettering in Cincinnati, designed collaboratively by first-year communication design students as part of a typographic archaeology exercise.
About
Each typeface in the family originates from a fragment of letterform discovered in the physical world – ghost signs, garage sale flyers, hand-painted anomalies and municipal signage – then cleaned up and extended into a complete alphabet. The project ran across two sections of Typography 1 at the University of Cincinnati, with 37 students contributing individual typefaces. The result sits somewhere between archival document and functional toolkit, with an intentionally inconsistent, Frankenstein-esque character that reflects its collective authorship.
Classification
A collection of typefaces derived from found lettering in the wild – ghost signs, hand-painted lettering, packaging and municipal signage – giving it a distinctly vernacular, display character rather than fitting any single classical category.