The latest exhibition at Osh Gallery showcases a brand new alphabet featuring original letters and symbols designed by 24 Pentagram Partners from the London, New York, Austin and Berlin offices. 

Created by Pentagram in association with King & McGaw, the Osh Gallery Alphabet is a reimagining of the Conways’ Photosetting Alphabet, originally created for the company in 1974 by Pentagram’s founding partner Colin Forbes, and currently hanging in Pentagram’s London office.

Photosetting used a photographic process to generate type on photographic film or paper, and Conways was a London-based shop providing this service for the design community in the 1970s. Acting as the bridge between hot-metal type and digital typography, photosetting expanded creative possibilities and radically changed graphic designers’ approach to type. 

The original Conways’ screenprints featured 26 different typefaces, with each letterform directly related to the typeface it was set in, for example, the letter ‘C’ appeared in Cooper Black. For the Osh Gallery Alphabet, the partners have created entirely new letterforms for the 26 letters of the alphabet, as well as the ampersand and full-stop.

Pentagram’s Angus Hyland explains: “Colin’s 26 original silkscreen posters are actually hanging in our studio at the moment, and they’ve been much admired, partly for that very unapologetic Seventies mix of fonts and colour. I mentioned to Gyr the idea of reimagining the project, largely because it felt like a good opportunity to create a permanent body of work for the Osh gallery: something we could hang between commissioned exhibitions, and also leave behind as a way of marking this moment for the partnership.

The big difference between the two projects is really about intent. The Forbes posters were built around existing typefaces and were very much about showing how flexible display fonts could be, as well as what the then-new technology allowed you to do in terms of stretching and distorting letterforms. With the 2026 version, the focus shifts. It’s about exploring each letter on its own terms, without any pressure to make the set cohere into a usable typeface.

The colours came out of a desire to keep the chromatic spirit of the Conway alphabet alive, but without slipping into a straight Seventies pastiche.”

Prints are available in four sizes, framed or unframed, and are available to order from kingandmcgaw.com.

The Osh Gallery Alphabet will be on show until Thursday 2 April at Pentagram London’s gallery space in Islington, London N1.