For the Love of Nonsense

Harry Pearce was called on by Saks Fifth Avenue over the holidays to add a dash of festive cheer to their seasonal catalog. The catalog makes holiday shopping so easy that Saks decided to sprinkle its pages with 108 of Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums, a long-running series of images that use wordplay and typographic invention to present a familiar phrase as a cryptic puzzle that toys with the relationship between typography and meaning.

Saks approached Pentagram after receiving our 2007 holiday greeting, Decipher, a collection of cryptograms designed by Pearce. Each year Pentagram issues a small book as a seasonal greeting to its friends and colleagues, intended to give better value than a simple card by providing an entertaining diversion over the holidays. The idea instantly appealed to Terron Schaefer, Saks’ senior vice president of marketing, who contacted Pentagram to devise a similar style of festive fun for the holiday catalog.

A closer look at Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums and a chance to test your wits against the complete set of 108 after the jump.

The Conundrums have long been a personal passion of Pearce’s. Now, thanks to a meeting with the publishers Harper Collins, instigated by Schaefer, a book of Harry Pearce’s Typographic Conundrums will be published in Autumn 2009.

“I’ve been designing Typographic Conundrums for as long as I can remember,” says Pearce of the project, “Nonsense has proven to be a great ally.”