Experimental typography treats letters as visual material rather than neutral carriers of text. Designers stretch, fragment, layer or rebuild letterforms, often pushing legibility to its limit, so that the shape of the type carries as much meaning as the words it spells. The approach has deep roots, from the Futurist and Dada poster experiments of the 1910s to Wolfgang Weingart's Swiss New Wave and David Carson's layouts for Ray Gun in the 1990s. Today it is driven just as much by tools: variable fonts, code and 3D software let a single typeface bend, animate and respond. Annual challenges such as 36 Days of Type give designers a yearly reason to reinvent the alphabet one character at a time.

This edition of our Top 10 series, first published in February 2022, collects ten projects that show that range. Several come from the 36 Days of Type challenge, where every letter and numeral becomes a small study of its own. Alongside them sit display typefaces such as TASTYPE, Brikfont and Pangea Display, a custom font for the National Bank Open tennis tournament, and NIKE's typographic tribute to Rafa Nadal's 21st Grand Slam title. Most of the work leans into saturated colour, pink tones and the 90s energy that defined that year's visual trends. For more typefaces and lettering projects, explore our type design archive.

David Milan by Pocko Agency

TASTYPE by Dominik Czank

Brikfont by Craig Ward

National Bank Open Font by Patrick Seymour & team

Get Yourself Together by Savants

Pangea Display Font by La Libertad

36 Days of Type by Fernando Cordeiro

36 Days of Type — 2021 by Christian Pietrzok

NIKE celebrates Rafa Nadal’s 21st GS by TwoPoints,net

33 Days of Cyrillic by Sophia Khotina