Show Us Your Type – Beirut

Show us your type is a project about typography and cities. Every now and the people in charge pick a new city and post a call for submissions. There are only few rules, the name of the city should be part of the poster design and the size of the poster is fixed to 396 px x 559 px.
Anyone with internet and some free time – or some unfinished doodles – can submit a piece. One hundred pieces are selected to be showcased on the website.

The title of the project Show Us Your Type implies that every time the project is launched a new set of typographic posters would mirror the idiosyncratic identity of a city and the culture it fosters. The virtual nature of this pseudo-gallery however brings together submissions from all over the world, as shown by the captioned work. Most of the submissions come from people who aren’t residents of the city but people who based their artwork on preconceived notions and internet searches for what that place is about and what landmarks it holds.

What is meant to be reviving showcase of handpicked typographic work ends up as a collection of imagined realities.

The latest exhibition was about Beirut. Several posters had disconnected reversed arabic characters; a result of not knowing the language and not having the Middle Eastern version of the Adobe Creative Suite. Other posters used arabic letters by layering them in a textural and gratuitous approach that fetishizes the oriental look of the Arabic script more than anything else. A lot of the designs submitted from Lebanon however, portrays Beirut as a self-destructing burning city, a response to the recent yet familiar situation.

Below is my submissions, probably a mix of all the above.

Posters at the Gelman Gallery

The four posters Infinite Traces are on display, part of the Personal Culture: Here, Now Together show at the Gelman Gallery (RISD Musem). The gallery  is accessible to the RISD museum visitors and the general public in RISD’s Chace Center and will run till  October 28th, 2012.

Exhibition curated by: Amanda Hu MFA 13 PR and Saman Sajasi MFA 13 PR

Typologies

+Printed/Paper +communication/signal +Writing +Lettering/typography/calligraphy +code/system +icons +subversive +absurd/noise +performance +middle east/arab +power dynamic/politics +generative +populist+language +war +sustainability +identity +aesthetic +interaction +resource+ +archive+ collection +together/participation +systematic +(self)control +segregation/integration +rhizome +psychology +Instructional Diagrams +Organizational diagrams +People: People organizing in social groups / patriotism / nationalism

Thesis Mise en Scène

The following is a mise en scène for the thesis thinking process. A collection of potential territories and areas of interest. A potpourri of ideas, events, people and places that influence my work. 15 categories, 45 sub categories, 135 images.

Reading: Deconstruction and Graphic Design

Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller. Published in special issue of Visible Language on graphic design history, edited by Andrew Blauvelt (1994)

[...]

Post-structuralism’s emphasis on the openness of meaning has been incorporated by many designers into a romantic theory of self-expression: as the argument goes, because signification is not fixed in material forms, designers and readers share in the spontaneous creation of meaning. This approach represents a rather cheerful response to the post-structuralist theme of the “death of the author” and the assertion that the interior self is constructed by external technologies of representation. According to the writings of Barthes and Foucault, for example, the citizen/artist/producer is not the imperious master of systems of language, media, education, custom, and so forth; instead, the individual operates within the limited grid of possibilities these codes make available. Rather than view meaning as a matter of private interpretation, post-structuralist theory tends to see the realm of the “personal” as structured by external signs. Invention and revolution come from tactical aggressions against this grid of possibilities.

[...]

First things first

How does one start writing down a thesis? He just does. The following is a list of ideas I plan to edit over time. Some are more abstract than others.
Belonging and the desperate need to identify / the unique and the collective / together alone / belief and religion promoting oppression and ethnocentrism / participatory / generative systems / evolution in systems, sequences, order, semantics and logic (or lack of) / systematic creativity / the planned and the accidental / glitch and noise / language and typography / redundancy / the Archive / control and (self)censorship / alienation and integration / …

Placeholders for Unspecified People

Tom, Dick and Harry — in English
Pierre, Paul ou Jacques — in French
فلان وعلان — in Arabic
Pedro, Paco y Juan — in Spanish

Reading: Metaphors We Live by

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 2nd ed. University Of Chicago Press, 2003.

[...]

We have seen that metaphor pervades our normal conceptual system. Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms. This need leads to metaphorical definition in our conceptual system.

Definitions for a concept are seen as characterizing  the things that are inherent in the concept itself. We, on the other hand, are concerned with how human beings get a handle on the concept – how they understand it and function in terms of it. We are concerned primarily with how people understand their experiences. We view language as providing data that can lead to general principles of understanding. The general principles involve whole systems of concepts rather than individual words or individual concepts. We have found that such principles are often metaphoric in nature and involve understanding one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience.

Such a concern for how we comprehend experience requires a very different concept of definition from the standard one. The principal issue for such an account of definition is what gets defined and what does the defining.

[...]

Rhizomatic identities and the need to belong

“The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.”

-Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

The following is a compilation of loosely connected ideas. It is the current state of an ongoing research and readings rather than an exhaustive essay towards a conclusive end. I will deliberately omit citing a bibliography because most of the content is not my own. It’s more of a compendium of writings by other people; collected, amalgamated and sometimes re-written, beyond just ‘referencing’. I will however try to keep track of my sources in the bibliography page.

The metaphor of Identity as strata inspired a series of posters found here.

Continue reading…

Justification Posters

Kashida is a type of justification used in the cursive connected Arabic script. In contrast to white-space justification, which increases the length of a line of text by expanding spaces between words or individual letters, kashida justification is accomplished by horizontally elongating characters connections at certain chosen points. Kashidas have been used by calligraphers not only to justify text but to impose a desired aesthetic flexibility in compositions.
The two posters use Kufam typeface to push the concept of justification and question Readability, Texture and Figure/Ground relationships.

The posters were part of the RISD Graphic Design Graduate Student Exhibition (2011) at the Sol Koffler Graduate Student Gallery.

Kufam is a bilingual typeface originally commissioned by Khatt foundation, part of the Typographic Matchmaking project.