Alphabetic Behavior

Above: Gabrielle Tigan became fascinated with the way that photocopy machines softened, garbled, and desanitized typefaces. Her experiments were finally catalogued in a self-initiated zine whose primary text was drawn from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Take a photo or find a photo in which type does not behave as you’d expect. Use this photo as the basis for a new typeface. Come to class with the photo, your sketches, and a specimen of the typeface in use.

This assignment is from the class Typographic Research. It is completely inspired by the article “Experiments in Type Design” by Tobias Frere-Jones, the majority of which is visible on Google Book Search here.