Time to celebrate summer with a post about letters in sand.

Those millenia-old little granules provide a lot of lettering options. Wet, they stick together better, but dark sand is fairly low-contrast. Dry, they want to lay flat, and so are hard to shape into forms, but with deep enough troughs (or a sun low enough in the sky), you can get some nice definition, such as with the rough serifs above.

But really, the best parts are that (A) you’re on the beach, and (B) nature’s own Etch-a-Sketch is easy enough to reset whenever you want to start afresh.