Week 2 — Assignment “Letters Tour”
Project 1 1A
Discuss + Studio due Sunday (end-of-day). Reply to other people’s posts by Tuesday.
Project 1: Letters in the World—a visual study of letters in your world and creative translation of this knowledge into an image series. This project begins with you taking walks around outside with your phone/camera—and documenting every instance of letters and numbers or linguistic marks you encounter—get up close and capture detail. Pay attention to the unique formal/language qualities, materials and colors, and situated contexts of these design artefacts. In the weeks ahead, you will use these photos—to create a presentation of different organizations and use them in translation to create original visual compositions.
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Discuss:
Watch the 2019 Typographics Festival presentation by Ed Fella—Analog Letterforms to the Nth Degree
Write your response (200 words minimum) as a comment to this post.
Questions:
1. When describing his work, what does he mean by connotative and denotative?
2. What is Fella’s teaching philosophy?
3. On a personal note, what inspired you about Fella’s design work and life story?
Reply to at least two other people’s posts (below). Due Tuesday.
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Studio:
1. Do a walk(s) yourself and photograph all the letters, numbers, other language marks (municipal, graffiti, weathered) you encounter.
2. Take a minimum of 50 photos, don’t edit your process yet. Be exhaustive and thorough in your documentation.
3. Upload all your raw photos to your folder on one drive.
4. Write a brief description (2–3 sentences or more) of your project so far below as a comment as well. Where did you walk? Include the link to your work on one drive in your comment.
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Links:
further inspiration—watch A Tour of Barcelona Mosaic Storefronts with type designer, Laura Meseguer.
Edward Fella: Letters on America, Lewis Blackwell
[from Typographics]—”This talk took place in The Great Hall at The Cooper Union on June 14, 2019. The livestreaming and video recording were made possible by a generous sponsorship from Google.
“My fascination with the seemingly unlimited variety of forms that a proscribed letterform can take before it becomes illegible and ultimately just a trace. This presentation is a quick career-long traverse, with examples ranging from what is still communicative graphic design to a fanciful purposelessness, which could be called art.
“Ed Fella is a former commercial artist and professional graphic designer who practiced for 30 years in Detroit. After receiving his MFA from Cranbrook in 1987, he taught in the graduate Graphic Design program at CalArts in Los Angeles for another 30 years. He is currently a Professor Emeritus and continues working on campus in his studio on a wide-ranging series of his own idiosyncratic projects that stubbornly resist categorization although they freely partake in the conventions of typography, photography, illustration and fine art. The recipient of many awards, his work has been extensively exhibited and published during the last several decades.”