MA Contemporary Typographic Media is a one year Postgraduate design course at the London College of Communication, a College of the University of the Arts, London… read more
Maya Littman designed the Dexica typeface for dyslexic readers with an intention to reduce stress while reading. Dexica is a slab serif with rounded terminals, offering a robust but friendly overall look and feel. The x-height is large and counter forms are open facilitating easy character differentiation. The typeface’s efficiencies and improvements were developed progressively with the collaboration of experts and a group of dyslexic readers.
Can the core themes of ‘In The Penal Colony’ by Franz Kafka be visually communicated through the form of the book, thus creating a visual translation of the text?
Polina Joffe’s books are pierced in order to progressively retell Kafka’s story using the form of the book alone.
Clementine Carriere’s work investigates how typographic design can be used to structure editorial content in independent publishing.
For her final project she developed the pilot issue for SP/IP, a magazine providing a platform to exchange opinions, interests and experiments about typography, design and print. The pilot issue focuses on independent magazines produced by Elana Schlenker/Gratuitous Type, Kevin Finn/Open Manifesto, Gee Vaucher/International Anthem, Existencil Press, Laure Boer and Lucie Pindat/Un Demi.
Ming Jing Lu’s typographic research project is an exploration of the effects of visual intervention in fictional narrative. Working with Jean Giono’s lyrical novella “The Man Who Planted Trees”, Ming sought to transcribe the story’s themes into the fabric of its construction, transforming wood to book and book to wood again.
Swarm is a group workshop examining the principles of generative design. Ordered and disordered systems are explored as processes for producing pixelated, binary forms which can be unpredictable, varied and complex despite their simple programmatic origins.
Working with six numbers selected either by chance or choice, participants complete a series of briefed visual exercises, composing tiled squares. Working sequentially from the lowest chosen number to the highest, participants design tiles without a general plan, considering only the visual quality of each individual tile composition.
Once all the squares are completed they are assembled as a whole in arrangements based on consistent incremental sequences defined by the group.
In the exercises below, four sets of outputs made by nine participants are shown in pairs facing each other symmetrically. Each set follows a different constraint.
Cat Tonge’s work explores visual fiction. She created a series of experimental visual translations of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, a short novel by Angela Carter, using images typographically. The aim was to translate a traditional text based book form into purely image based narratives.
“I worked with key themes in the novel, such as the relationships between men and women or humans and animals, replacing the story’s text with specific visual vocabularies.”
The LCC Postgraduate Design : Research exhibition represents the academic research, exploration, critique and understanding of visual, textual and verbal communication that makes postgraduate typographic design at the London College of Communication distinctive.
“Since human perception always, inevitably, involves human interpretation, the line between perception in general and reading in particular is perfectly blurry.”
Brian Heffernan’s MA typographic research responds to Florian Cramer’s statement above. It seeks to break open the relationship between language and the visual forms which contain it. The project uses an extensive range of typographic interventions to explore the potential of visual encodings to both generate and enhance bodies of text, producing engaging, active reading experiences.
Paulien Hosang’s project work seeks to capture momentary urban experience in the form of the book.
By visualising the environment, culture and activities of a particular street within a city, Paulien’s studies aim to create a link between subjective and objective topography. Her project translates multiple journeys through the London’s Berwick Street into the narrative form of the book.
Stephen McCarthy completed the MA in Contemporary Typographic Media at London College of Communication in 2011. His design studies were focused in the field of pictography on both practical and theoretical levels.
Stephen’s final project, England’s Burning, tells the story of the 2011 English riots using pictograms in the form of a tabloid newspaper. It has a narrative approach, using a relatively small vocabulary of elements, interpreted by McCarthy working as a visual reporter. The goal was not to express opinions or provide explanations: It was more an exercise in economy and restraint — trying to relay the story in the most simplest, clearest terms using only pictograms.
England’s Burning is available to purchase from Unit Editions. Buy a copy here.
Lina Abdul Hadi is a Jordan-based graphic designer and typographer. Her interest in typography, calligraphy, and language, both Arabic and English, led her to undertake the MA Contemporary Typographic Media at the London College of Communication in 2011, where she researched language and its visual articulation.
“The reconciliation of Arabic and English, both in content and as typographic elements on a page, has been a subject of interest (and frustration) for designers, copy writers and translators, mostly in the Arab regions and, more recently, for Western enterprises that aim to reach an Arab audience.
This project was an experiment into new ways of reconciling these scripts. It was inspired by the power of language as dialogue: as a courteous exchange, devoid of political agendas and misinformed preconceptions. It aims to scrutinize language at its most elementary level. It employs letterforms and basic linguistic structures as devices to investigate the merits of a traditional script acquiring selected facets of another language.”
Read an extensive interview about the Kufan project here
Eli Kleppe’s MA Major Project, The White of The Word, investigates the significance of white in visible language. The project explores space as a dynamic entity, essential to cognition, and draws attention to the materiality of the unprinted spaces of printed matter that are usually taken for granted.
The project examines notions of whiteness, conceptually and philosophically, and the multiplicity of meanings that reside in silence, emptiness, absence and the void.
The final output is a transliteration of Stefane Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Des” in the form of a book containing only debossed counterforms, produced through an appealing combination of lasercutting technology and a 19th century embossing machine.
