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DB 3
Posted in: Design Brief by admin on November 03, 2008
3.1
Excuse my translations in the following comment. My Spanish is a tad rusty.
This is a video clip from the band “El Cuarto de Nos“, “The four of us”. The song is called âYa no sé hacer conmigoâ, âI still don’t know what to do with myselfâ. The conceptually, as much as what is being shown is very eye-pleasing, what is done with the type has been overdone. The reason I think this clip is set slightly apart is because of the vectorized video footage playing over the fonts.
The text in this video is actually following the story being told by the lyrics. So the show is not being run by the text as it were. Another element that piqued my interest is the extra attention that is payed to the sound of the voice. Where the notes are prolonged, the letterforms get deformed accordingly to the phoneme being pronounced at that very moment.
The words at times, see to integrate with the scenery of the band playing. Which introduces the notion of text as the environment and as a collective memory. Because what is memory? Is it the recollection of stimuli? Images, scents, textures? Or can it also be a a factual recollection of events neatly arranged in point form. In the latter case, the heavy integration of text documentation in our society can very well bring back the idea of text as a memory.
Supporting this idea of the memory, the sequence of âeeeticoâ ranging from 0:29 to 0:34 plays on the notion of rhyme. It must be remembered that during the oral tradition of the aboriginal Amerindians, it was easier to remember a story if it was sung because the sonority of the tale would act as a mnemonic engine.
This second video uses fonts as characters to enact a scene. This video utilizes the visual proprieties of different fonts to generate a personality from them. This video is quite contrasting from the previous as the fonts are used to evoke emotion and not to carry textual and graphical information.
Times New Roman is used as a moderator to the whole conference as it were. For the last few versions of Microsoft Word, which does happen to be the most popular word processor in the world, this font has been default. It is also used in many books and does well as a leader.
Later in the video, things get a tad complicated for the non-initiated as the later characters or fonts are not shown or detailed. For example, I have no clue whatsoever what the daughter of Courier is : Curls something. And Comic Sans saving the day seems just wrong, although his costume is cool.
3.2
This site introduces a way of working with letterforms that is actually quite useful. It allows users to be in complete control of different anatomical parts of different letters, all the while explaining what each and every part is. It allows the users to effectively move, scale and rotate the many parts. It also has a gallery feature that is great for inspiration. The most poignant aspect of this piece in my opinion might me its’ title. âType is artâ. This site is made for people who might not have noticed what is going on artistically in the world of type as a door for the non-initiated.
This website is comprised of 8 different treatments of type, all of which are presented in a very empirical manner. This site is not as hands on as the previous in that is allows for very little user creativity. The demonstrations of the use of type are nonetheless quite poignant. The âWeightâ section is interesting in that in compares the volume of different characters. The relative quantity of ink used to print a paper in different fonts can be estimated. Building a tool that allows just that would be helpful in saving ink when printing. Some pieces are of less interest, like the âVisual Composerâ, which uses boringly the keyboard of the computer as a musical keyboard. Overall, I believe that these two websites, although simplistic in their approach both help to describe typography as what it truly is : useful art. The ultimate Marcel Duchamp.
3.3
The third part of this assignement was designed by Emmanuel Lalande and myself. We call it Jailtext. Since it has its’ own webpage, here it is without further ado.
3.4
The fourth part of the assignement also has its’ own little blurb. Why don’t you go check it out.