What would an alphabet look like if each letter were made of the food it represents? In 2017, Strahinja Jovanović set out to answer this question, creating a series of isometric illustrations that transformed letters into fruits, vegetables, and dishes. The result is Alphabet, a playful, vibrant, and surprisingly delicious reimagining of the ABCs.

The project takes a simple premise and executes it with care. A is not just the first letter; it is an apple, rendered in isometric perspective, its form built from the curves and colors of the fruit. B is a banana, its yellow shape bending into the familiar strokes of the letter. C could be a carrot, its orange length curling into a curve. The series extends across the alphabet, each letter corresponding to a food that begins with it—fruits, vegetables, and dishes that range from the familiar to the unexpected.

The isometric perspective gives the series its distinctive character. Unlike flat illustration, isometric drawing creates a sense of volume, of space, of objects that exist in three dimensions. The letters become not just shapes but structures, built from the forms of the foods they represent. An apple is not merely a red circle; it is a three-dimensional fruit, its roundness articulated, its stem reaching upward. A banana is not a yellow crescent; it is a curved, volumetric form, its peels peeling back to reveal the letter beneath.

Color is equally important. Each food has its own palette—the red of an apple, the orange of a carrot, the green of a pear, the yellow of a lemon. Strahinja uses these colors not as decoration but as meaning, associating each letter with the sensory qualities of the food it represents. The result is an alphabet that engages not only the eye but the imagination: you don't just see the letters, you taste them.

The series is also a meditation on the relationship between language and experience. Letters are abstract symbols; we learn them as children, associate them with sounds, use them to build words. But letters also carry sensory associations—the taste of an apple when we say A, the smell of a banana when we say B. Alphabet makes these associations explicit, turning the abstract into the edible, the symbolic into the sensory.

For Strahinja, the project was an opportunity to explore the intersection of typography, illustration, and play. The work is serious in its craft—each letter carefully drawn, each perspective consistent, each color chosen with intention—but light in its spirit. It invites viewers to engage with letters in a new way, to see them not as abstractions but as things, as foods, as objects to be tasted.

The series also reflects a broader interest in the materiality of language. Across his work, Strahinja has explored how letters can be built, how they can carry meaning beyond their sound. In Orthoments, letters are built from modular ornaments. In Neue Modulo, letters are built from strokes typed. In Alphabet, letters are built from food—a reminder that language is not only abstract but also embodied, not only symbolic but also sensory.

Alphabet remains a vibrant, joyful project, a celebration of the pleasures of eating and the pleasures of seeing, of the connections between what we say and what we taste, of the letters that shape our world and the foods that sustain us.

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