Compose Delicious Messages With Typolade

This weekend countless children – and also quite a few adults – in The Netherlands received the initial of their first name in the form of a chocolate letter as a gift. This age-old tradition happens on the eve of Saint Nicholas, and today those chocolate letters have already disappeared from the stores. Yet typography lovers can appease their chocolate fix all year long with Typolade.

Read more about chocolate letters on Unzipped.

Typolade is more than just chocolate letters. It's delicious moveable type in chocolate, created by Sandra Kübler and Christine Voshage for their Stüttgart-based company Typolade. That's right, you can actually compose one-liners, two-liners and longer messages with letters made of quality chocolate. Those letters are handmade by selected chocolatiers using chocolate of minimum 60% cacao – the dark aromatic bitter kind, not some wimpy milk chocolate. Frequent production of small batches and a perfect conservation guarantee a superior final product.

The letters in FF Fago Monospaced Bold 48pt rest on blocks of chocolate which are 12 mm wide, 21 mm high and 23 mm deep. The full alphabet is available as caps only, plus Ä Ö Ü (the common German accented letters), numbers, and some punctuation (& ! ?-). The great thing is that you have the option between the easy to read "left-to-right" version, and the authentic Gütenberg-style version. Aegir Hallmundur made a wonderful suggestion on his Ministry of Type blog – by pressing the type on warmed rice paper one could print edible messages. Neat.

All images:L. Lambert & J. Lyncker