Recombinant Typography
An exploration of extremes, incongruities, and unconventional oppositions
Recombinant Typography
An exploration of extremes, incongruities, and unconventional oppositions
Artifacts speak. They have a voice and a visual language, and through design, these languages hint toward the manner with which they are to be interacted. This voice can shout or whisper, and the visual language can emote subtly or expressively. Context ultimately determines the nature of this voice: how it communicates and with what tone. From architecture to typography, visual languages give design artifacts identity and personality, revealing intention, and communicating with a shared language to intended audiences.
In the spirit of flirting with the ridiculous, the desire arose to combine elements from two disparate, seemingly diametrically extreme design practices to explore new modes of creative making. From the macro — the realm of architecture — a concept reframing the solidity of built structures through the introduction of divergent processes of combination was explored. From the micro — the realm of typography — a negation of the intrinsic capacities of clarity, legibility, and readability was replaced with strategies mimicking the mass production of contemporary cultural expressions obtained at the level of the street.
Recombinant Typography began as a thought experiment that expanded through the design and development of typographic forms. Its formal presentation was executed within a printed and bound publication. The thesis involved a reframing of my design process and my understanding of what typography has historically been, what it currently represents in today’s contemporary context, and what it might become through future considerations and critique. By introducing new sites of research, new tools of documentation, new digital formats of visual elements involved in the process of creative development, and the overall intention within the design and production of typographic form, a sense of tension arose between the goal of type design and the effects embedded within the project’s output of creative play.
The framing of the project took into consideration the long and arduous historical development of type design to establish a starting point determining the fault line for where certain sacrosanct rules were to be broken. It should be noted (even if obvious) that strategies for safeguarding both legibility and readability were of little concern within the project, as they were replaced by the incorporation of surrounding influences in the form of cultural production hanging within city streets. This inspiration, guided by forms of photographic documentation made while walking city streets and alleyways, replaced the historically cherished rules of typography upheld for centuries.
The desire to produce surprising outcomes was made through several choices: the inversion of typically implemented processes of design; the documentation of design elements by way of unconventional tools; the production of unconventional digital file formats for the development of typographic forms; and unconventional recombinant processes plucked from the adjacent practice of architecture. As strategies such as recombinant architecture beautifully reframes our understanding of what an abode might be and how it might function, of how architecture might both come together and recombine to produce unexpected outcomes, Recombinant Typography imposes similar theoretical points of contact in consideration for how typographic form might be realized. Ultimately, the project served as an effective warm-up for developing divergent processes of design thinking, creative exploration and play, and formal production models in an attempt to present large and complex projects meaningfully. It also served as an effective “pep-talk” for gaining the courage required to dismantle tried and true design strategies in favour of divergent, creative processes of making. The project (project 1 of 3) was completed in the spring semester of 2010 as a required component within the Design Studio course.
The final article can be read on Medium.