My name is Natalia. I am a linguist, brand namer, strategic writer, and photographer. I am also a baker, cook, bicyclist, potter, mother, sister, and daughter. I like misty days, organizing things, false cognates, investigative procedural dramas, and learning about typography.
The world probably doesn’t need another blog—but I need one. Here it is, and here is my first stab at a post someone might like.
Former exterior signage at Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishoj, Denmark, photographed in 2009.
The fragment of a building captured in the frame is wabi-sabi at its best—a semiotic feast of resolved contradictions: cautionary and quiet at the same time, clean and dirty, centered and unbalanced. Even the text is a double entendre, and a reminder that we rarely think about invoking a trancelike state when dealing with less evocative entryways. The typeface is almost certainly Gill Sans, a humanist sans-serif designed in England in 1926 by Eric Gill, typically modernist in its clarity but with a more organic feel and a less consistent character set than many of the structuralist, mechanical fonts of the time.
I knew this photograph would be a favorite from the moment I saw the preview on the Ricoh. But I have learned since that the sign is no longer there at all, and I’m noting how the idea that a photo can never be taken again may be what makes it most precious of all.
More photos, more brief essays on topics I hold dear, and more insights to come.