Figurative Typography, Anyone?

The Raw Shark Texts is a book written by Steven Hall, which includes figurative typography along with its normal storytelling text format. I highly recommend reading this book; it's a compelling, fast paced read, and there's more figurative uses of typography within the book than what I am posting here, but I'm not saying you should read the book just because of its creative use of typography. The video below is from their marketing campaign for the book on Youtube.

Robert Massin created unprecedented figurative typography in Eugene Ionesco's La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in 1964 with the photographer Henry Cohen by printing typography via letterpress onto sheets of rubber and then manipulating and photographing it (Meggs 443).

Poster Design + Technology = Motion Poster!

Wow, the poster sure has evolved since the posters we first started studying way back at the beginning of the semester. 

Poster by Ruby Soho, at sohoruby.tk

"Australian denim collection Denim & Thread is planning to release a motion poster that ties in directly with their print campaign. “The motion poster picks up the story, where the still ends,” a campaign advantage owner Alex Lambousis is very excited about. Although only a few samples and a quick behind the scenes video has been released, it will be very interesting to see how the motion poster develops and enhances their print campaign."

Denim & Thread - Motion Poster [samples] from Sidat de Silva on Vimeo.

Who are you?

Remember my Doctor Who themed Art Nouveau post from February? Well, recently the BBC decided to redesign the television show's logo.

One major characteristic of the show is that the character of the Doctor can regenerate every cell in his body if mortally wounded, resulting in a drastic (but not too entirely different) change of appearance and personality. This ability helps the Doctor to "escape death" in a way, although he has said that regenerating is almost like dying since the person he becomes as a result of the regeneration is often distinctly different from the previous Doctor.

Lost yet?  Here's how it is related to the visual identification systems we've been studying in chapter twenty of Meggs' History:  so far the Doctor has regenerated a total of eleven times, and each time the show has aired with a different Doctor, it has been introduced with the appearance of a revised logo in the opening credits. The latest logo is composed of the letters DW, which come together to take the shape of the Doctor's time traveling box, the TARDIS.


In 1960, Norman Ives stated that a symbol's function as a logo should:

convey with a clear statement or by suggestion, the activity it represents...The symbol, besides being memorable and legible, must be designed so that it can be used in many sizes and situations without losing its identity (Meggs 403-4).

This is particularly important in an extremely visually engaged culture, since symbols are practically competing against millions of other symbols for the dominance and permanence that William Goldman achieved with his pictographic CBS eye trademark from 1951.

How Not To Revise Your Identity

On the television show Community, which takes place at a community college called Greendale, the dean tries to promote an environmental initiative for the school's green week by changing the college's name and logo.

Geometry and Typography

Here's the official poster for this year's 64th Festival de Cannes, a film festival which celebrates international cinema:

What first struck me about this poster was the simple elegance of its design. Of course, while the elegance can be partly attributed to the use of a photo depicting the actress Faye Dunaway (photomontage, anyone?), it is the geometric '64' which becomes a main focal point. It actually reminded me of Rudolf Koch's Kabel light typeface from 1928. 

Fuuuturist Pattern Poetry

The picture you see below is the book cover designed by gray318 for The Mayor's Tongue, a novel written by Nathaniel Rich. 

“‘The Mayor’s Tongue’ begins when two guys who work for a moving company in New York form an unlikely friendship...Alvaro speaks only Cibaeño, “virtually incomprehensible to natives of the other Spanish-speaking countries in the Caribbean”; Eugene speaks English and Italian. The friends are unable to communicate, and yet they converse feelingly, or at least they think they do. Alvaro is writing a novel that he asks Eugene to translate, and Eugene believes that he is able to capture the essence of the story, even without knowing the language.” 

—Sophie Gee, author of the New York Times' Sunday Book Review for The Mayor's Tongue. 

I really enjoyed following the words across the cover; I think it goes well with the subject of communication that appears in The Mayor's Tongue. When I first saw the cover design, its animated quality reminded me of Filippo Marinetti's pattern poetry in his Les mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom) of 1919:

On a side note, this is also a great book whose cover text takes the shape of a hand: 

It's Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The Colors of Russian Suprematism

Okay, so initially this image may not look like a poster from the Russian suprematist style, but what they both have in common is color: specifically, the combination of black, red, and white. The first image is a Japan Relief poster designed by Adam Chang; if you buy one of his prints, the profits support the Doctors Without Borders earthquake relief efforts in Japan.

Earthquake relief poster for Japan by Adam Chang

El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919).

Suprematism is a painting style that was founded by Kasimir Malevich that utilized a combination of basic forms, pure color, and geometric, nonobjective abstraction (Meggs' History of Graphic Design, Fourth Edition).

William Morris and Book Cover Design

William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century (way back in chapter 10 of Meggs' History!) is the first person I think of when I look at these textile-inspired book designs:

From Penguin by Design, by David Pearson Design.

Hardcover Penguin Classics, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.