Expressive Typography
Kelsey Rooney
The Beginning After looking through the list of words, we were asked in class to participate in the practice of mind-mapping. The mind-mapping method is when you create associations based on one word, kind of like a chain reaction or spider web, connecting all of the pieces. After participating in this activity with the class, two words really stuck out to me the most - “pop” and “ribbit.” Pop was one of the words that really resonated with me initially. It was a word that I automatically had a number of different connotations of, which was reassuring that I wouldn’t get lost when doing this assignment. Ribbit was a different story. It was one of the more obvious words in terms of the direction to go in, but I think that is what drew me to it most - it was more of a challenge. I wanted to go beyond my comfort zone and try to think of something more creative for this assignment - channeling the word without being so literal.
Inspiration In terms of inspiration for beginning to tackle this project, I wanted to see what was most effective for other designers when creating expressive typography. Through my research, I made of note that less is more. The designers that took a simpler approach and let the word speak for itself was vastly more effective than those that went the “gaudy” route. This is a direction that I knew I wanted to go in immediately when beginning my project - although that didn’t stop me from trying new things and to experiment with adding more. I wanted to test that idea.
The Process
When I started to sketch, I let my research get away from me a little, and started to go the route of the gaudy. I was trying to be innovative by only using typographic symbols to create images that reflect what the word says - for example, the frog drawing. I quickly realized, however that this was an approach that wouldn’t necessarily work for the purposes of the assignment, and it was contradicting everything that I researched. When working on pop, I kept going back and forth about how literal it was, and that it wasn’t as innovative as I wanted to be. When we walked around the classroom, I can’t say that I didn’t see a lot of similarities between my drawings and the sketches of my classmates. Back to the drawing table, it is. I then began to play around with the word “lick” and came back surprised that I was making something pretty cool.
Final Product Overall, I am very pleased with the direction that I took with this assignment. I’m glad that I went for the simple approach with this project. I believe that the more successful of the two is the “ribbit” one. I think it was a clever way of taking on the word, and it wasn’t terribly literal, screaming at you “I’m a frog.” This assignment was beneficial in showing that typography can be a form of expressing an action, a feeling or even a physical object. Type can do all of those things, even without elaborate visual elements.