“create an iconic, visual welcome to the city and celebrate it’s creative and cultural community.”

Window of Leeds was designed by the agency Something More. They worked in collaboration with XKX projects and was commission by Leeds Bid via Leeds City Council Unfold Programme.

The typographic installation presents to the visitors, commuters and locals an insight into the creative talent. And work as a welcoming to the city and what it has to offer.

This installation is very simple and effective, and has similar ambitions to what we want to create ourselves. By celebrating the Market, but also the creative community in Sheffield as well. As we have been considering creating big letters we mainly wanted to use this project as a research example of ways we can actually manufacture these human-sized public typographic sculptures.

So thankfully something more have an amazing blog on the making processes they went through in order to create the final Window of Leeds letters.

“They needed to support themselves, but also be ready for people to potentially sit on them (the L) or generally knock into them. What material would be the toughest? What had the right tactile quality? What felt robust and simple? What would be easy to clean and maintain?”

So in the end they used steel to create these letters. As far as I am aware these were created from segmented sheets of metal that were separately welded together to a seamless finish. (Looks pretty intense) and clearly a very skilled process. The steel letters were then coated with a ‘powder coating’ which is why they have the plastic white appearance to them.

It was important for these guys to create their letters as frames and to not have them distract from the artwork that is seen on the inside. If the depth be too wide you wouldn’t be able to see the work great from different angles, yet it had to have some good structure to it so people would be able to interact with them. It’s interesting to see how many things they really had to consider for them structurally and visually work.