The Old Marriage of Word and Image, or...

Just word as visual provocateur!

Explorations in Media and Materials..... Long has typography been a love of mine. Long has hand-rendered text, and handwriting been a love of mine. These two things as actual subject/content for a piece is certainly not a new concept for me, specifically as a recovering graphic designer....

But LORD, could I have used some of those ideas and explorations when I wanted to teach my high-schoolers about typography, while creating their own logos.

With the students, there was a stiffness about using text that I couldn't wrap my brain around. But this, of course was because the project was framed as "design", which is always a little intimidating in the beginning...

Student work: using two interlocking S as a personal logo for "Shannon"

And it occurs to me now that the project should have been approached from the perspective of our Tuesday's class, specifically for those who have never worked with text. From an abstract perspective.

I, personally, could explore these different aspects of text within design, or art endlessly. I really enjoyed the scope of artists that we looked at, who use text in different ways, for different purposes. As "Textuality" (great word) as "communication", as an invitation to a multidimensional experience. There is a richness to using text in a piece when the text melds what it sounds like, looks like, and also its meaning.  I also like the pieces that brake these things apart. Someone mentioned Text Rain by Camile Utterback, which I researched, and I think this work plays with these elements of abstract visual, and meaning (since the letters are actually not random, but from a poem) very gracefully and subtly:

If you stand long enough or in certain positions,
you can catch words or phrases.

I could have taken my cue from the other class I was teaching on street art. I had shown that class the work of Jenny Holzer and John Fekner, ...and even Poster Boy, who plays with existing text in subway ads.

And so with our class,  I am always happy to be reminded of the artists I forgot about, such as Barbara Kruger, and rethink artists/designers such as Paula Sherr who is a great example of a designer who works with words as geographic planes as in her Public theater posters for the effects of both visual dynamism and communication:

but also uses words as texture and pattern in her art pieces such as her series of infographic maps.