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Wallpaper* tart cards

Wallpaper* recently invited me to contribute to their tart cards typography project. The cards, based on the prostitute ads left in London’s phone boxes, were supposed to be typographically led, so I started with the idea of using Gill Sans against an image of a naked woman, punning on Gill/Jill. This seemed too coarse, frankly (and someone else did a similar thing anyway). In the end I realised I should come up with something to do with magazines and went a little off-brief.

It’s a strange coincidence that the titles of woman’s magazines use many of the same words as the sex industry. Both magazine titles and tart cards are seeking to sell a fantasy, of course, but other than that it is just coincidence. Company as magazine name is friendly; the same word included in a sex ad means something else. Anyhow, I coarsely printed the logos of six magazines on flouroscent paper to highlight the crossover.

Here are three of them, above, as printed in the magazine’s Sex issue, out now. See my six cards here, and all 450 cards at London’s KK Outlet until June 29th.