Gary Zidek of WDCB’s “The Arts Section” visited the Design Museum of Chicago and toured Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types. Zidek talked with the exhibition’s curator, Amira Hegazy, and learned about unique approaches to typography found in Chicago’s neighborhoods through sign painting, graffiti writing, calligraphy, and much more.

“Chicago design is huge and well known and well respected, but I wanted to tell the story of typography as I knew it in Chicago…My Chicago has graffiti, my Chicago has advertisements, my Chicago has grocery store signs, hand-painted. And I wanted to figure out where does that come from? What do our neighborhoods actually look like and how do we learn the ways that we actually write and speak to one another through letterforms because letterforms change the entire way we read anything. It makes our information actually meaningful.” — Amira Hegazy, curator of Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types

Listen to the interview on WDCB.

Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types is on view at the Design Museum of Chicago through April 4, 2025.