TO TEXT TO FORM

The author analyzes how the distinctive, uniform structure of monospaced typefaces shapes the visual and communicative impact of selected posters. By exploring complex design layouts, the author investigates the balance between aesthetic appeal and readability within these font types.

KD-Workshops

An ongoing series of type posters announcing the 6 guests for the annual communication design workshops and talks of the design department at the State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). Focusing on their names, the letterings highlight each guests commitment of attending and hosting a 2-day workshop.

Schlegel Club Posters

Schlegel Kultur Club, located in the basement of the former Schlegel Brewery, hosts regional and international artists in Bochum. Through concerts, listening sessions, and exhibitions, the club promotes a diverse and inclusive culture. Monthly events feature unique posters with custom lettering.

Type Treasury

The font “Type Treasury” was created in a dialog between Fanny Liebhardt and Tessa Darimont.
Using a sticker set of simple geometric modules, they pushed the limits of the modular system.
The result is a collection of diverse characters that functions as a modular font and can be combined with each other as desired.
The “Type Treasury” combines a readable basic style, 10 expressive sets, an experimental initial set and a set with a wide variety of arrows.

Empty Street – Full Houses

Radio (z)Onderdak is a creative workspace and radio show in Antwerp for homeless and undocumented people. Independent and focused on connection, they highlight participants’ talents. “Radio (z)Onderdak” means “Radio (No)Roof.” The experimental, hard-hitting poster were printed 1,000 times and placed in areas where the homeless are often overlooked, reflecting their harsh conditions and creativity.

ZENSURA

Propaganda, media censorship, and literature played the central role in the Russia-Ukraine war. As stances hardened, cultural bonds faded. Deconstructing and reconstructing Cyrillic letters highlight the corruption of truth, identity, and culture. Trauma is nonverbally conveyed through over 1,000 new characters. “Zensura” is a publication and system that portrays the loss of communication and truth through image distortion and an homage to USSR propaganda posters.

Soliflore

A visual interpretation of Soliflore written by Iris Colomb, published in Colliding Lines’ anthology HOME which invited various designers and typographers to reinterpret the works of featured poets. The individual letters were generated using a script written in Basil.js to randomise the point size and angle within Adobe InDesign, while the additional details were crafted manually.

MOTHER

This typographic artwork, created with LEGO and printed by hand, features letter designs inspired by organic shapes. The project involved designing letters using LEGO Dots pieces without the aid of technology, manually arranging different configurations off-screen. This blend of rigid plastic pieces and softer final forms adds a meaningful dimension to the word “mother.”

Chronic Poetics

Visual interpretations of I Don’t Feel Capable by Amber Renee and Exit Sign by Gem Blackburd published in Chronic Poetics, an anthology by Point Positive Publishing and Colliding Lines. Both designs called for creative coding to build the initial design structure. The first utilised Basil.js to generate a randomised cluster of shapes within Adobe InDesign, while the second employed a JavaScript code by Christian Marques to produce a glyph rendering. The actual words were then manually placed.

Blog Article Covers for Ester Digital

Iryna Baranova’s work for Ester Digital features blog article covers with a dadaist, experimental approach. The creative method, designed to produce covers efficiently within just one hour due to heavy workloads, can be adopted by others if needed. It blends random photos, the studio’s brand font, analog-inspired techniques like dithering and pixelation, and a muted palette extending the brand colors. This approach balances playful visuals with serious article topics, adding irony to the series.

Grill House Stencil

The Grill House Stencil font is a project dedicated to exploring alternative digital vector tools. While working, the designer tries to follow the logic of the tool and explore new typographic styles. Kind of a typographic rodeo. To tame the tool and bring out its wild nature.

The Grill House Stencil font includes two types of capital letters and collection of ligatures. Support Latin Basic, Western European, Central, and South Eastern European languages.

Plastic

Like appearantly a lot of people this year, i had the idea to create an iron-on bead font, but on a hexagonal grid with a backslant. For the poster, i created special block glyphs so that i could type the whole poster. While experimenting with assigning different bead sizes in cavalry, i accidentally stumbled upon this gradient effect, because the noise took the circle index as input instead of its coordinates. Since it looked quite nice, i left it that way.

From Toys to Type

“From Toys To Type” was an interactive installation that invited you to rediscover playful design. At the three stations of the triangular table, visitors could stamp glyphs based on predefined rules using toys such as Lego Duplo, wooden blocks or CUBORO cubes. The three different toys each created unique visual aesthetics wich were shown off on the poster for the installation.

The Code of Poetry Poster

To promote the artist talk “The Code of Poetry”, the poster features the custom font from my on-going type making project, in which I create letter faces look like optical code and are scannable by AR lens. The poster gives the audience an idea of the subject matter: seeking poetic moment through coding and computation logics, with both analog and digital mediums.

Symbol As Flow

To celebrate the launching of the website “symbolasflow.online”, the poster was created based on the idea: how to translate webpage into printed matter? With the custom title type that was inspired by shapes of hyperlinks, alt-text, and many other visual vocabularies of web architecture, the poster became a flattened shape of the “web homepage”, showcasing 14 rows of visual projects, created by 14 student contributors in the actual website.

REDCAT Poster

The poster was designed for a performance talk at REDCAT. The title is set in bespoke Chicano lettering with undeleted guides. This visual setting leads to and suggests a period in the 1960s when the life of the local Chicano community was confined and influenced by the highway construction in East Los Angeles.

Casual Friday

This poster was created for the final projects exhibition of Master’s students from the type design and self-publishing studios at Aalto University’s Media and Arts program. The type design studio held a modular type design workshop where students had to create a Latin alphabet with numbers from various shapes by hand in 3 hours. Nikita and Diana compiled these letters into a typeface and used as the main element of a poster. Every glyph is unique, showcasing the group’s diversity.