Name: William SpeedStudent Number: 0706839Stage 3 Semester 6FINAL MAJOR PROJECTIndependent Practice 3B: Summation & Production EGRD3015

Type is saying things to us all the time. Typefaces can express a mood and atmosphere. Type adds a colour to the writing. Everywhere you look you see typefaces. It is natural to see letterforms, so natural that we over look them all the time.

A typeface is a collection of characters that belong together. We experience typefaces without thinking about or even acknowledging all the facets that make up even the simplest of type.

We read words all the time, but we do not experience the actual letters.

Letters are something that have evolved from the scribe’s handwriting, to the more standardised letterpress to the many fonts of the digital age.

Letters are no longer what they were in the age of the letterpress. Each letter was hand carved in wood or metal, intricately made, typeset sensitively and spaced with lead between letters. It was the last time people fully engaged with the printed letterforms in a way that is not experienced in the current age of digital letterforms where letterforms lose some of their substance From a very early age we have been trained that a letter has a certain associations (a is for apple). We look at letters in a certain way with certain expectations, that is if we look at letters at all.

This book is a brief enjoyment of letters made from a series of different outcomes in places and with materials that you may not have suspected.

The letters are not the same font, they are not a set or an alphabet, and they do not make a word. They are presented here simply to be enjoyed.

“For me, experimental typography, as I use it, is a play back and forth between the unspoken impact of the physical form of the individual letters and the literal meanings formed in the mind by the specific group-

ings.” (Gyongy Laky)

The quote above reflects my feelings about typography and inspired me to undertake my project exploring the beauty of letterforms and investigating whether they can exist inde-pendently of words or whether the word is central to the understanding of the letter. It is fascinating how these abstract, irregular shapes that form our alphabet have come to carry so much weight and meaning in society.

Although I have experimented with two-dimensional type and letterforms, my main focus has been the creation of three-dimensional letterforms. These 3D letters have allowed me to explain and explore typographic terms in a literal way, in a way that can be experienced in an interactive way incorporating tactile sensations to support the visual experience.

Initially, I encountered problems with how to translate an essentially two-dimensional thing into a three-dimensional object and so experimented with nets until I could competently form letters in all three dimensions. Once I achieved this, I could start being experimental. “Many people confuse experimental with ‘decorative playing’” wrote Jonathan Barnbrook, and so I experimented with different media to achieve a range of effects that were not merely aesthetic. These effects, by and large, impacted on the audience’s experience of the letterform. They were able to experience the letterform not just visually, but also tactically, olfactorily and even through tasting them, making them a sensory and sensual experience.

Alongside exploring letterforms, I explored whether individual letters can stand alone and still be appreciated or whether it was necessary to have a group of them to form a word for any kind of appreciation or meaning to occur. My research shows clearly that letterforms have a beauty that can be seen when they exist as individuals but to really mean anything they need to be a part of a word. Of course, there are some obvious exceptions such as ‘a’ and ‘I’, which are words in themselves as ‘a’ is used as the indefinite article and ‘I’ is a pro-noun.

However, in my book I used my made letterforms rather than a standard typeface, as I wanted my readers to appreciate the different letterforms as they read my work. Although the legibility does suffer at first, the reader soon gets used to the irregular fonts and comes to find the experience charmingly quirky.

The book would be of most interest to those who, like me, find letterforms fascinating. That is to say that this book’s target audience would be Typographers and those who work closely with fonts and letterforms.

The art of Eric gill (2005) directed by Sam Flynn Helvetica (2007) directed by Gary Hustwit.Stephen fry and the machine that made us (2008) directed by Patrick McGrath

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