Painting With Words
May 2008
Book created as the main project for my graphic arts degree course. A celebration of letters, words and language, it explores the visual form of the word and its power to strengthen communication. The book draws examples from a range of disciplines, from art history, literature, poetry, linguistics and philosophy to fine art, photography, advertising and graphic & typeface design.
Printed and bound in Leeds, UK. Hardback, blind embossed cover & illustrated dust jacket (not pictured). English & French, 160 pages, 160 x 215 mm.
Top
May 2008
One of the first pages of the book. Introduces the idea of 'word-pictures' and the use of the form of type to emphasise the semantic content of words. Features my reproduction of a word design from 'Watching Words Move', a 1960 typographic notebook by Brownjohn, Chermayeff and Geismar.
De Stijl Manifesto
May 2008
Double page spread featuring a selection of passages from the second de Stijl manifesto of 1920 which advocates the need for a unity of form and content. The page design uses both languages side by side, almost intertwined in parts - a recurring characteristic throughout the book.
Silence
May 2008
Page showing a pencil illustration of the second part of a quotation by Susan Sontag; "The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence." The typographic style and use of space on the page is intended to contrast the much darker, busier illustration of the first part.
Velocidad
May 2008
Featuring 'Velocidade' by Ronaldo Azeredo, this double page briefly looks into the development of concrete poetry in the late 1950s and the emphasis on the word as a unit in space. I chose this particular piece to highlight the use of repetition which allows the word to systematically emerge from the block of letters.
Dom Sylvester Houédard
May 2008
This page, along with the one below, is based on experimental poet Dom Sylvester Houédard. I wanted to use simple yet strong typography to accentuate certain parts of this quote in a subtle and clean way. The last part of the original quotation reads "...read quickly in a phrase, words get lost."
Lost
May 2008
Last word in the previous quote. It's placed right near the edge of the opposing page for a little added detail.
Rhythms
May 2008
Double page spread featuring a wooden letterpress composition of a quote by designer Paul Elliman. The text introduces sound and phonetic poetry, works in which the phonetics of speech are given primary importance over more conventional semantic values.
1984
May 2008
As one of the final pages of the book, this is about 'Newspeak', the fictional language in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a language whose vocabularly gets smaller every day. The text suggests how the importance of words and their visual form reaches well beyond the realms of communication alone.