September – December 2022
This is not a revival. Revivals are predictable: find a source, get inspired, and do an interpretation. At EsadType, I learned to take a source, subject it to systematic experimentation, and use that to come up with something completely different. It’s a great way to get out of a rut. The process was bewildering, but it taught me to art direct fearlessly.
AtypI 2023 Lecture: » This is Not a Revival «
Eighteenth-century French sheet music covers often feature “maigrettes”, or narrow hairline captions that were engraved by a lithographer.
While my first instinct was to recreate the features of the original lettering, it proved to be more fruitful to recreate the conditions instead. Using improvised tools and writing surfaces made me lose control of the letterforms as I squished them into impossibly small spaces. The only way to go was sideways.
Switching tools, I took the disfigured structures from the hairline experiment and added contrast to them artificially with a Speedball nib. I originally worked on uppercase and lowercase letters before questioning the necessity of the lowercase.
Referencing the quirky constructions from my micro-sized engraving experiments, I exaggerated features to manage the extreme horizontal proportions.
Drawing upon my Speedball experiments, I added weight until the counters were eliminated, forcing all of the identifiable features to the outside.
Taking the counterless concept to the max, I pushed the letterforms out to fill the glyph bounds. With the sans serif, I played a game of minimalism by reducing the identifyable features of each letter into a small percentage of its surface area. Now try reading that.
Everything came together when I had a clear use in mind. Illegible side-by-side, I decided to stack the letters vertically to maximize the tension between letters and to create a standalone graphic tool, filling a poster from margin to margin.
