I realized something while I was exploring decorative typography in class. I need to widen my research. I decided to widen it to designs that use words to make an image; whether it’s a recognizable image, an intense pattern or a single word that portrays an image. Broken down, the categories are: words as image, decorative typography, hand rendered typography, and expressive type. I’m really interested in typography that looks like an image from a distance but changes into words and letters when you get up close. I’ve noticed a pattern of faces (especially famous ones) for this category.
With the expressive type category I’ve noticed two kinds that stand out. One is the kind that we learned in Type 2: purely using the letterforms to create the words. I seem to be drawn to these because of the complexity of just using words; but I enjoy the other group because of the humor and ingenuity, along with the tendency to be eye candy. I see this group as one that expresses the type through background or materials. Is that still expressive type?
I want to explore every direction of each category. I’ve been looking at everything; from Stefan Sagmeister’s type that’s expressed through materials and environments to Cavan Huang’s explorations with motion based expressive type. I’ve found less about the history of these things and more about why these designers use these techniques. Huang wants to enhance the way we communicate and Sagmeister wants to “touch the heart of the viewer”. The different motivations behind each designer’s creation are what make them important. Christina Follmer used hand-stitched type on everyday objects to comment on everyday well-known situations while Marian Bantjes wants to bring delight and joy to the viewer.
These styles appear a lot in our current day culture because they’re really popular right now, but they each have a foot in history. Dada-ism is an influence, along with calligraphy, textiles, paper craft, etc. etc. And a lot of the time the history is apparent in the design.
1 comment:
i'm not sure where your questions are, or any other process that would benefit from being on your blog.
that said, it sounds like you're opening yourself up to almost the full range of typographic study. the other day we talked about making a gradient of things based on your selected content, and i'm fine with that. but somehow that seemed much more focused than what you wrote here. maybe i'm just missing something.
seems like using the same content and re-designing it to show a range of expressivity, from simple typeface choice to an illustrative solution using type, will help you achieve your goal. but that's what we touched on in class.
a key here is taking careful steps from one form to the other, so there is minimal jump. this can be done by making very small changes, maybe only changing one parameter at a time and saving that study, then changing a second parameter, saving, a third, save, etc. then we can see the slow morph from "plain" typography into type as image/illustration.
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