Typography Exhibition
Concept for an Exhibition Catalogue celebrating all things Typography.
Typography Letterforms
Exhibition Catalogue cover design.
Typeface
Book Design and Celebration of Typography through Posters and Postcards.
Target Audience:
The curious museum-goer and reader, maybe those who had not thought about Typography as an aesthetic pursuit of its own or were not aware of it before. Pitching the exhibit for a museum, the aim is for 18 to 60 year-olds, hoping to draw them into the exhibit or to look at the catalogue for the exhibit.
Background:
Typography analysis and study of history and form. Develop an understanding of the proportions, rules,
and spacing that make up the world of typography. From ancient letter forms and their pictographic roots to the Classical alphabets from which we get our contemporary, Western character, word, text, and hierarchy forms for expression. A hidden world, but hiding in plain sight: typography is sort of an un-
appreciated art. The exhibit and the accompanying book would hope to change that situation and leave
the audience with some real knowledge and a
deeper understanding of the craft of our
shared linguistic heritage.
An alphabet, built on ancient pictographs.
Letterforms
Design Problem:
Separate pieces were created for the typography course, so creating a framing element of a catalogue for a gallery or museum exhibit gives an “event” and a location to tie things together. Adding to the book layouts, poster design, and alphabet creation for the typography course and unifying the projects with an event and its promotion will be the main problem: how to frame the works into a cohesive whole.
Design Process:
Research into the roots of written communication and pictographic forms led to creation of a unique human-form based alphabet or typography system. Further historical study into the development of Western type yielded a dissection of the parts that add to the whole of letterforms as we know them today. Bringing together the historical groups of typography as known today, during the transition into contemporary digital typography, was a main goal of the poster and book layout projects.
Typeface families and history, as a Western poster.
Print Design
Design Solution:
The letterform alphabet was inspired by contemporary art and petroglyphic forms from North American pre-European cultures. Sketches led to simplification and purification of forms until a consistent letter size and language was created.
For the Anatomy of Type, solid historical treatises on the creation of type were studied and emulated (such as Doyald Young’s influential text), and a design concept built around the simplified symbology of the Chemical Table of Elements, from the study of chemistry, yielded a unifying them for presenting the description of typeface anatomy that was a requirement of the assignment. The layout of the pages went back to influential typesetters from Europe’s early Golden age of typeface study and design, where the Golden Mean and asymmetrical but balanced use of margin, gutter, and content areas created aesthetically pure two-page spreads.
The posters for the project display a summary of three typeface families with historical context. For the idea behind the solution, I chose to study Hollywood film posters for Westerns and other iconic genres, like Thrillers, letting the letterforms, their composition, colors, and layout standing in for the hierarchies imposed by the language of the posters of the 1950s and 1960s in American cinema.
Typography, from the 19th Century to ours
Dot Matrix
We all read about and use digital devices that have as their basis base-2 math, a series of zeroes and ones. In the early era of computer generated communication, one system for building an alphabet was to use 8-bit combinations of computer characters to stand in for our Roman alphabet. The book and exhibition catalogue tracks the ancient history of Western lettering from its European roots into the machine age. Layouts in the book make tension out of the contrast between the crude letterforms of a Dot Matrix typeface and the clean letterforms of our contemporary and universally adopted digital sans serif lettering.
Gunslinger
Emulating Saul Bass and other poster artists from Hollywood during the golden era of large format cinema, Westerns, and Suspense genre stories, I looked into new ways of presenting information graphics: Goudy Old Style is a typeface that gets a treatment like Clint Eastwood, falling as it does into a timeline of classes of lettering families, visible across the bottom of the composition. Color choice is from the same Hollywood genre area of movie posters.
