Monday 12 April 2010

Typography and Papercuts

The heading for this blog was created with a papercut manipulated in Adobe Elements.  Realising the concept involved finding a suitable typeface, research into images of tigers and moths, design, photography, and image manipulation.

The idea was to have a white on white minimalist wording and logo.  The alphabet selected was one of Josef Albers Kombinationshrift designs.

    'Do less in order to do more' - said Josef Albers.

Albers created these alphabets while at the Bauhaus school in the 1930s', and they exemplify the school's ethos of simplicity of form and function. This particular alphabet uses 10 basic shapes based on a circle and rectangle and produces a font that is meant to be easy to learn and economic both to use and produce.

You can see in this diagram the 10 shapes that Josef Albers used to make this Alphabet.

Projects to Try
1.  Devise your own alphabet out of two or three simple shapes.
2.  Collect small objects or parts of objects that look like letters.
     Scan them (remember to cover the glass with an acetate sheet to protect it),
     and compose into an alphabet on your desktop, and print.
     Or,
     If you have a darkroom, make photograms of the objects, and mount them
     together to form a composite alphabet.
3.  Photograph abstract subjects that together form an alphabet.

Here are some interesting examples:-
Photogram alphabet by Dutch Osborne

Flotsam and Jetsom - Peter Tonnington (scanned objects)

Fellaparts font designed by Ed Fella in 1993 and distributed by Emigre, Inc.


 For other examples see David Airey's gallery at www.davidairey.com/alphabet-photo-art-gallery/

1 comment:

  1. I needed some inspiration and this is it. Thanks for passing it on.
    And here is something from me. Although you may have already found her.

    http://www.photoinsider.com/pages/madigan/madigan.html

    ReplyDelete