“Anyone with a Mac can typeset,” says Doug
Bartow, principal of id29 in Troy, N.Y. “But don’t
confuse that with typography. To a designer, it’s
akin to the conceptual differences between blank
space and white space.”
Indeed, when faced with a project that has a
miniature budget or nonexistent art, some designers
might be tempted to use plenty of white space
to fill blank space. But the most inventive designers
find these limitations are simply interesting creative
challenges—which can often be met making type do
double duty as art.
Putting the fly in the bottle
As Bartow points out, “I’m driven to create work
that hasn’t already been done. One way to approach
that is by creating original typography and letterforms.”
A case in point is the artwork Bartow
created for eMPAC’s (the Experimental Media and
Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute) presentation of the philosophical comedy
play, The Fly-Bottle. “The e in eMPAC is for
experimental,” notes Bartow. “I thought this would
be the perfect project to experiment with creating
new typography based upon the tenets of the performance.
The fly-bottle was an old English pub
tradition where they would keep an unwashed bottle
under the bar to attract the flies so they wouldn’t
bother patrons.”
Looking closely at illustrations of insects,
Bartow found “there were a lot of parallels between
portions of insects and parts of letterforms. This
became my entry point into the piece.” Using
Stempel Garamond italic and Kuenstler Script as a
start, Bartow “took the typefaces apart, sliced up the
existing letterforms, married them with other glyphs,
and then started adding other elements.”
Bartow tried to use both a fanciful and
restrained hand. “I wanted it to be scary, like a fly
looks under a microscope,” he notes. “But there’s a
lot of nuance, a lot of optical adjustments that have
to be made. You have to make formal decisions based
upon each letterform and how it relates to the next.
This is a different methodology than I would use if
I was designing an entire typeface, where reason and
order are necessary for consistency. With individual
letterforms, more care must be taken with each letter
and how it works with the next.” The result of
his efforts was a piece of original art that worked not
only as a headline, but also evoked the themes of the
play it was promoting.
Instructions not included
For a poster project in which there was not only no
time and no money, but also no information, Maya
Drozdz of VisuaLingual in Cambridge, Mass., chose
to assemble rather than draw a custom headline.
Using only dingbats and clip art she already had
on her computer, she designed an inventive poster
to announce a lecture by design historian Alston
Purvis at Montserrat College of Art.
Because she didn’t know the topic of his lecture
in advance, “the overall design covers all bases of
design history,” she notes, “and I added the title at
the very last minute. It’s just a jumble of elements,
the old, the new, the ancient, the high, the low. I
figured that if you’re going to bring in all of design
history, why can’t you bring blackletter and wood
type together?”
Drozdz used this project as an opportunity
to work off “personal dares,” plucking and putting
together things she wouldn’t normally use. “Another
little dare was to use hot rod flames,” she says. “It’s
a low culture thing that has nothing to do with me,
so I wanted to find a way to use it that would be me.
I just manipulated all these elements and took them
out of their usual context. It was a bringing together
of the odd bits I had. And then once I had them laid
out, I manipulated them to make them fluid.”
Drozdz strung together everything from the
symbols for pi and a men’s bathroom in such a way
that they spell the speaker’s name. “I wanted it to be
type and image, so when it came to the details, they
had to be a little bit off, but they needed to read easily.
I used the elements almost as I found them, and
my work consisted mostly of combining them. It’s
OK if the title is a bit of a struggle as long as you can
easily read the name in the bio.”
For this narrative, she used a standard typeface,
replacing some of the letters with characters from
other languages and symbols. “I did it very quietly so
you can still read it, but there are things that are not
quite right. The goal was just having fun.”
Drozdz chose some green paper she’d picked up
at an office supply store and had the posters screen
printed. “This paper is designed for very dry, clear
information, yet what’s happening on the page is very
baroque and free. It’s an interesting contrast,” she
notes. “The elements are neatly placed, but in a semblance
of randomness, so I thought a background of
orderliness would be good.” This project has helped
her prove the point she frequently makes to her students:
“You can make anything work; it’s just a matter
of how you work it.”
Sense of involvement
For Hayes Henderson, creative director of HendersonBromsteadArt,
the ultimate in opinion expression
comes in theft. “These posters get stolen a lot,”
Henderson says, “and that’s the best compliment
when you’re a designer.”
He’s referring to the posters his firm has been
designing for years for the Secrest Concert Series
at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Supported by mailers, the posters are meant to create
excitement and provide nuts-and-bolts information
about the concerts. A strong concept and custom
typography have become their signature solution.
According to Henderson, “I think a lot of the
type treatment evolved from the pressure of making
the artwork look good, and then having to strap all
this information onto it. Instead of throwing the type
up into a corner, it started to evolve into interrelating
the image and the typography as a way of getting
all the information, but softening it a little bit, and
making the poster a collectable piece of art.”
All type for the posters is hand drawn from
scratch, without reference to any standard typeface.
“We just drew the tree shape and then filled it in
with type. Each branch represents one event, and
each band of color on the hat poster is also a different
event,” Henderson notes. “This gives visual
cues that this information goes together and that
information goes together. It’s important to keep
information hierarchy rules in mind.”
But according to Henderson, it’s also OK to
stretch some of the rules, especially when it comes
to legibility. “There are two different theories: Either
you make the type easy to read, or you make it
difficult so people have to work to figure it out,” he
says. “If you make it a little tricky—as long as it’s not
illegible—they will work at it and draw more info
from it, they will go up and involve themselves with
it. People will feel a sense of success when they work
it out and they won’t even realize that they’ve been an
unwitting participant in the experience.”
Critter composite
Arjen Noordeman, design director at MASS MoCA,
the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art,
regularly faces the challenge of too much, rather
than not enough, art. For him, beginning with type
grounds his design process. “When I face the blank
sheet syndrome,” he says, “I often just start drawing
type to clear my head and get into the subject.”
To create a poster and accompanying book
for an exhibit about animals in contemporary art,
Noordeman began with “all these freeform animal
symbols that you can find on the internet—reptiles,
zoo animals, insects. I didn’t want any of that to be
apparent, but I thought if I threw it all together, it
might work. So you see a wing, or leg, or hair, all
these different organic elements, without knowing
what animal it is.”
His initial experiment, however, was deemed
“a little over the top. So I thought that the next logical
step—since the show is about hybridity, the space
between animals and humans—would be to merge
this idea with another typeface.
“I made a hybrid of my experiment with an
Emigre typeface called Filosofia, and that gave me
this kind of a little bit Hollywood, horror movie-ish
typeface. It became a lot more legible, and still had
that critter-like quality,” Noordeman explains.
To achieve the composite, he says, “I quite literally
overlaid the letterforms on this beautiful serif
typeface and somehow it fit. Even though the letters
were drawn without any grid whatsoever, I just
pushed and squeezed a little bit.” He also pushed and
squeezed the type within the book itself. “I changed
the sizes of each letterform on each page. I wanted
them to touch each other and grow around each
other and create this sense that the type is alive.”
Noordeman recognizes that many designers,
when faced with such strong and even disturbing
images, might choose to make the type very simple,
almost subservient to the art it supports. “By nature,”
he says, “I kind of want to take over everything and
that’s not always called for, so sometimes I have to
pull back a little. With most things I do, there are
a lot of people who love it and a lot who hate it.
I don’t make much quiet work, but I’m fine with
people not liking it as long as they have an opinion
about it.”
And after all, participation from the audience
is what design is all about. When type is also art, it
communicates both information and beauty, thereby
enriching the connection between the printed piece
and the viewer by simultaneously appealing to head
and heart.
