Week 2 — Assignment “Typographics Toolbox”
[Project 1 1A]
Discuss + Studio due Sunday (end-of-day). Replies to other people’s posts due Tuesday.
Project 1—Multimedia variations in the typographic study of a word and typefaces through imaging. Exploration of type form, pattern, color, texture, rhythm, sequence, and motion.
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Discuss:
Watch the talk by Crystal Zapata: SPACE—An exploration of process, material, and a cross-disciplinary design approach from the 2022 Typographics Festival. Please respond to the questions below, as a comment to this post (200 words minimum). https://wordcounter.net/
Questions:
1. How does Zapata discuss “space” in her talk? How does she relate it to graphic design?
2. What is the project that she presents which uses modularity?
3. On a personal note, what inspired you about Zapata’s talk and work?
Reply to at least two other people’s posts (below). Due Tuesday.
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Studio: Choose an 4–5 letter word. Create a “toolbox” of graphic letter compositions—different experiments framing individual letters by hand, and capturing these with your camera. Work with different typefaces, weights, slants, case, orientation, and degrees of legibility. In the next weeks ahead, we will work from these typographic studies, to incorporate color and texture, and to create graphic patterns and installations.
1. Select an 4–5 letter word (not your name).
2. Working in Indesign (8.5 x 11 in format) —typeset and print the letters of your word with enough space around them individually— I recommend three rows and three columns see demo in class. Explore lots of choices for the typography—possibilities of case, weight, slant and typefaces. Investigate multiple typefaces that are sans, serif, slab serif.
3. Use a handmade paper cropping frame—two “L” shapes of paper—to “crop” the letters into a small “composition”—revealing various orientations, scales, and abstractions of the optical qualities and details. Make “crop” (make a photo) and move on to another approach with the same letter and then on to another letter.
4. Make quick photographs of each of your compositions, in the moment as you make them. Upload these photos into a folder, unedited.
“Touching and moving each element around the space opens up the way of seeing, and breaks the barrier of it otherwise being confined to the screen.” —Crystal Zapata
6. Next, working in ONE FILE in Illustrator—create several 3 x 3 in artboards for your individual compositions—(re)create a few of your photo compositions with typogrpahy and using your photos as a guide in the process. Set the letters, scale, and rotate them to match your photo guide. Make refinements or new compositions as you go. Convert typefaces to outlines where needed—might be useful for scale change. See demo in class.
7. Upload all of your unedited photos to Week 2 in your folder on onedrive, and your packaged Illustrator file and a PDF of the 3 x 3 in comps. Include a link to your Week 2 folder in the comment area below. What word are you working with, how was the process, and what were your type selections?
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Links:
Crystal Zapata website
SSense
“POSE”
Math Revealed
Renata Graw
Normal
Fonts:
BADASS LIBRE FONTS BY WOMXN
Google Fonts
My Fonts