Typographies beyond the Classroom. New school Typographies through Contemporary Art (original) (raw)

Typography and Diversity in the Process of Learning

Typography day, 2017

Typographical transition in a child's early reading stage Author: Anitha. B, English Learning Foundation, Chennai, India, anitha.vb@gmail.com.This paper provides an insight into the importance of font consistency for small children and beginning readers in the English Language. In the early years of life, a child has exposure to print typeface at home but soon is introduced to the cursive representation as soon as he/she enters primary school. Most Indian schools lay a lot of unnecessary importance on introducing children only to the cursive way of writing letters. However, all their textbooks and workbooks are in the print typeface. In this paper, we will first examine the problems faced by young children and beginning readers due to inconsistent font usage in early learning material, and how sensitive children are to font style, size and spacing. Second, the paper examines the importance of maintaining the visual consistency of content throughout the design, illustrations and fonts across different media, especially for beginning readers and young children. Third, it examines the relationship between the effective visual presentation of content and learning outcomes achieved by children.

What is typography? Or, on definitions of a field that won’t be squeezed into a rigid framework

dsignn, 2024

The article presents partial results of a research project. It aims to diagnose the state of typography didactics at Polish universities, determine how it can be taught to respond to contemporary challenges, and explore the current usage of the concept of typography and the principles of teaching developed by Krzysztof Lenk. As part of the research, we conducted in-depth interviews with 18 teachers from various types of high schools (fine arts academies, universities as well as practical schools), in this article we present an analysis of a selected thread of these interviews - the definition of typography. We singled out the most important, interesting or frequently repeated definitions of this design field in the respondents' statements, and attempted to answer the question of whether our interviewees refer to theoretical approaches established in the literature. We then analyzed whether, and if so, how this translates into their teaching activities, analyzing the content and form of the exercises they carry out as part of the subjects they teach, distinguishing, among other things, the four aspects to which they most often pay attention - the correct conduct of the design process, sensitivity to the form of the letter, the ability to build a structure of information and the use of the letter as a message.

Seeing through Letterforms -Typography Past and Future

Perspectives on Visual Learning, Vol. 5 / Facing the Future, Facing the Screen, 2022

10th Visual Learning Conference, 2022 provided a space for the research community to exchange and push ideas in regards to the theme Facing the Future, Facing the Screen. I took this opportunity to participate in the virtual research group and share some notes on the expanding ‘parameters’ of the typographic discipline. In the light of an ontological turn, pictorial turn, archival turn, and many other “theoretical interventions” which have generated a lot of contemporary rethinking, I explore ideas on situating typography in the space of emerging new thoughts, a fluid space that is posing a lot of routes for the expansion of the typographic scholarship. In the paper, I initially lean on Braidotti’s view on ‘posthumanism’ as a navigational tool to explore and expand the field by “comparing notes” across disciplines. Building upon this notion of comparing notes, I consider Leonidas’s reflections on typography which highlight historical and cultural complexities of the field. Their two theoretical standpoints support the main purpose of this paper which is to explore intersecting points between typography and other disciplines. I provide a very brief, and potentially very experimental, proposition of intersectionality between postdigital condition, reimagining of the archives, and typography as a culture-defining element. This paper is featured in an online volume Perspectives on Visual Learning, Vol. 5. edited by Petra Aczél, András Benedek, and Kristóf Nyíri.

Beyond Typography: Experiments in Form

This article reports on an exploratory journey that examines the usage of visual arts as a learning tool in typography courses. Through the use of pangram and Singapore English, Singlish, the study explores interesting ways to explicate information, hoping to conceive and interpret typography in surprising and inventive ways. It also aims to reflect a range of thinking about conceptual and illustrative typography. Students participating in this research are third year BFA Visual Communication undergraduates. There are three parts to this study: firstly, students are told to create hybrid typeface through exploration of combination and elimination methods. Secondly, they are expected to create Singlish pangrams. Lastly, students formed into groups to design three-dimensional installations for their chosen pangram. The final designs were exhibited in the Singapore Design Festival to collect data. A questionnaire-survey was used and the result was measured by the experiences of the viewers. This study hopes to inspire students to do contemporary design with a touch of their eastern personality.

View of typographic diversity in early-year typography studios

2018

Institutions teaching graphic design (and other post-secondary programs) are increasingly relying on international students to populate and fund themselves. (Hegary, 2014) With current communication technologies and mobility of populations, audiences likewise are more likely to come from different cultures, whether as international students, or recent immigrants attending post-secondary education. Although we actively recruit students from abroad, the education we deliver is oriented towards our traditional student, someone who grew up using the English language and what we generally call the "Roman" alphabet. This paper considers the value of introducing using non-Roman writing systems in communication design courses both as exploring different ways of communicating language visually, and as a way of integrating the knowledge and culture of international students and others with differing cultural backgrounds into a graphic design education. By so doing, we can better recognize students with diverse backgrounds as holders of valuable cultural capital by making the formal and functional attributes of the scripts used to communicate language of which these students are often, by dint of their experience, expert users. At the same time, we can widen and enrichen the education of local students, who have little knowledge or understanding of other script traditions. The practice of including those non-Roman scripts used by some of our students has three principal potential benefits. The first is to foster appreciation and recognition of, and respect for, the affordances and characteristics of non-Roman scripts, the second is to encourage experimentation with how language can be visually represented, and the third is to promote a more inclusive environment for the growing number of beginning students who, while they may be at a disadvantage in the use of the Roman script system or visual communication of the English language, have the opportunity to bring a knowledge and critical appreciation of the forms and functions of other writing systems to their fellow students, and gain confidence in bringing their own individual backgrounds, abilities and understanding into their design school experience. There is also a by-product of this last aspect, as it exemplifies an aspect of the classroom, respect for students' opinions and individuality, and the encouragement of the expression of critical thought by students that may not be a part of educational structures in some educational cultures. For example, Chinese students, who make up the majority of international students are socialized to have respect for authority and social harmony in the classroom, with little active participation from students. (Wang, Sun, Liu) Students from other educational cultures can learn that the expression of the student's opinion and knowledge is valued, which is a model of what most of us expect, or at least hope, will be a normal aspect of our classes. This is important to do as early as possible for students to fully participate in the student-centered education that is characteristic of North American art and design schools.

9. Applying psychological theory to typography: is how we perceive letterforms special?

2014

My research looks for parallels between our perception of letters and typefaces (by readers and designers) and other perceptual activities. Because I am concerned with perception, I have drawn upon examples of research into other areas of perception, both visual and auditory, i.e. the perception of faces, music, and speech. These research studies suggest to me avenues to explore in relation to how we perceive visual forms, and also stimulate ideas concerning particular methods of investigation. This approach leads to novel experiments within the field of typography. As a teacher, I am interested in how we train students in the visual discriminations that are required of typographers and what characterizes typographic expertise. But I am also concerned with the more general question of how we, as readers, recognize letters regardless of the typeface which changes their visual form. Although readers are not typographic experts, they are experts in letter perception, just as listeners are expert in speech perception. How do we process letters and how might typographers' perceptual skills differ from those of readers? The outcomes of this research are intended to have theoretical implications, contributing to models of reading, but also to have practical applications: a better understanding of reading could inform the teaching of reading and reading materials; gaining insight into how we process typefaces could feed into their design; identifying the nature of typographers' perceptual skills could facilitate training. Overall, my aim is to understand how we perceive letterforms.

Relearning Typography: Introducing a Cross-Disciplinary Typographic Framework

2004

Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography is taking from its traditional print medium. Screen-based typography is becoming as common and widely used as its print counterpart. It is now timely to re-evaluate current typographic references and practices under these environments, which introduces a new visual language and form. This paper describes a study that utilises a combination of empirical methods and action research projects to form a new conceptual framework for the understanding and practice of screen-based typography. This study is part of a Doctoral programme in the School of Design at Northumbria University, UK. This paper focuses on the research carried out so far, the methodology used and the findings from two stages of the study. It will end by introducing a tentative cross-disciplinary typographic framework that has been developed to date. This study starts by investigating the relevance of the current framework and evaluates the need for developing an alternate framework through a questionnaire survey. This is followed up by a series of interviews with practitioners working across different disciplines in an effort to identify new media attributes most influential towards the development of screen-based typography. Results of the surveys have shown that understanding and identifying the future role of typography in screen-based media is key to the developmental strategy of this typographic framework. Typography continues to be one of designers’ main tools of communication, regardless of medium. The introduction of the digital medium has not lessened the importance of this role and has in fact increased the reliance on typography to communicate in a clear and straightforward manner. The influence of other disciplines in the development of new media content has also been strongly supported. Conclusions from this initial research points to the fact that the development of a framework must take into account several key factors. These include the impact of technology on the development and application of typography. The framework should also be responsive to the influences of other disciplines in the development of new media content. Influences from film, computer gaming, interactive digital art and hypertext disciplines must be appropriated into the building of a new knowledge base for screen-based typography. Identifying and understanding the influences brought about by other disciplines should be a major consideration in the development of the framework.

The typographic contribution to language

1987

This thesis presents a model that accounts for variations in typographic form in terms of four underlying sources of structure. The first three relate to the three parts of the writer-text-reader relationship: topic structure, representing the expressive intentions of the writer; artefact structure, resulting from the physical constraints of the medium; and access structure, anticipating the needs of the self-organized reader. Few texts exhibit such structures in pure form. Instead, they are evidenced in typographic genres – ordinary language categories such as ‘leaflet’, ‘magazine’, ‘manual’, and so on – which may be defined in terms of their normal (or historical) combination of topic, access and artefact structure. The model attempts to articulate the tacit knowledge of expert practitioners, and to relate it to current multi-disciplinary approaches to discourse. Aspects of typography are tested against a range of design features of language (eg, arbitrariness, segmentation and linearity). A dichotomy emerges between a linear model of written language in which a relatively discreet typography ‘scores’ or notates the reading process for compliant readers, and a diagrammatic typography in which some concept relations are mapped more or less directly on the page for access by self-directed readers. Typographically complex pages are seen as hybrid forms in which control over the syntagm (used here to mean the temporal sequence of linguistic events encountered by the reader) switches between the reader (in the case of more diagrammatic forms) and the writer (in the case of conventional prose). Typography is thus most easily accounted for in terms of reader-writer relations, with an added complication imposed by the physical nature of the text as artefact: line, column and page boundaries are mostly arbitrary in linear texts but often meaningful in diagrammatic ones.