A Tessellating Alphabet Coloring Book

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Available from Amazon.

From the Introduction:

Some shapes can be arranged to fit together to fill the plane--grids of squares, isosceles triangles, and hexagons are examples that we commonly encounter. There are many other shapes--some of which resemble animals, birds, or other things from our daily lives--that can also be made to fit together or tessellate and the patterns that result have fascinated generations of artisans and graphic designers. Among those other shapes are the letters of the alphabet, the focus of this book.

This book and the typefaces used for this text are byproducts of a quest to design maze books using patterns of tessellating letters. The resulting books were aimed at an adult audience; the mazes are far too difficult for young children. However, children may enjoy seeing how letters can be made to fit together. Like adults, they may find the geometry involved both intriguing and visually appealing. This presentation of tessellating letters in the form of a coloring book is one attempt to make the patterns I used in creating mazes accessible to a younger audience.

Every upper-case letter has at least one page devoted to it. Letters O, R, and K are the most difficult letters to tessellate. On the other hand, letters L, F, and T are easy to tessellate and each has several pages devoted to it.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed designing it. I apologize in advance for errors that remain in the book.

Robert Schenk
October 2012

PS The maze books from which these patterns were derived are called Puzzling Typography and Puzzling Typography A Sequel. The typeface used in this introduction is Tescellations; all of the letters in it will tessellate.

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