Standing alone, a well-crafted letterform is a work of art. Set in lines of text, the same letters assume a selfless anonymity, devoting themselves to conveying the meaning of the language. But creative minds from a range of disciplines have been inspired to have it both ways: by setting text in highly inventive designs that exploit the letterforms’ illustrative potential, these artists use language as the raw material for their graphic designs, appealing to the reader’s left brain (“what do the words say?”) and right brain (“what am I looking at?”) simultaneously.
Below, three such artists – a letterpress printer, an illustrator, and a graphic designer – discuss their creative approaches to setting type.
Layers of Texture
Bruce Licher of Independent Project Press, in Sedona, Arizona, is well known in graphics circles as a hand-letterpress printer with an incredible sense of design. His tactile, sometimes lush, sometimes minimal work is sought out by a diverse group of clients, ranging from the music group R.E.M. to couples seeking a truly unusual wedding invitation.
Licher often uses type to create texture in his designs. The typefaces he uses are those that are available to his press, and he admits that his process is one of “design-as-you-go.” “I have a vague idea of where I’m headed when I start, but I let the process of building the design, using the hand-set letterpress elements and printing the colors one at a time, determine how I approach the next layer,” Licher explains. “In other words, I design and print the first layer before going on to the next layer. This puts me in an interesting, simplified mindset, since I have to work within the confines of what’s already down on the paper when I’m designing the next color.”
Because of this process, as the type is added it has to fit into the design he’s already established. As Licher points out, letterpress type doesn’t offer the luxury of bumping the size down half a point to get it to fit, as one could on the computer.
Through long experience, Licher knows which of his faces work well together, especially when it comes to establishing texture. Even when mixing many faces and sizes in a single design, he is able to achieve a harmonious result. That’s because he treats every letter like a piece of art. By experimenting with scale, line weight, and face, he builds a composition, not just a typed message.
“I like working this way,” he says. “It draws more on my background as a fine artist, rather than any sort of graphic design lessons I may have absorbed over the years.”
Paper Type
Michael Bartalos is a San Francisco-based cut paper artist who creates elaborate illustrations using exotic papers and ordinary No. 11 X-Acto blades. Despite the time-consuming nature of his art, he frequently incorporates hand-cut typefaces into his work. In fact, for his children’s book, Shadowville, he created an entire custom font.
Another recent example was for Blab magazine. With knife and Sobo glue, Bartalos created an incredibly detailed illustration that took six weeks to complete. He decided that cut letters were more appropriate than typeset letters for this project, because the cut letters’ depth and dimension would complement the imagery around them. Typeset letters would have looked incongruously flat in this context. Also, he says, “I intended the letterforms to appear somewhat ‘carved’ to complement the story [‘18 Wooden Statuettes’]. I attempted this by angling the cut strokes and keeping them to a minimum.”
From a technical standpoint, he used a relatively lightweight stock in order to cut out the very small letterforms. The off-white type was cut from Fabriano/Rives Laid and the black type was cut from Pantone’s Black on Black.
Type used in art or as illustration needs to be integrated seamlessly, not added as an afterthought, Bartolos notes. Color, size and complexity are important aspects to consider when using type as part of an illustration, he says, as is legibility at an eventually reduced reproduction size. “I also like to see type successfully communicate an intended feeling or message,” the artist adds.
Type as Art
Brian Webb, partner with Lynn Trickett in the successful London design firm of Trickett & Webb, is an old hand at using type in illustrative ways. This is evidenced in his company’s creation of 1000 Years, 1000 Words: A Celebration of the Royal Mail Millennium Stamps Project, a limited edition book commissioned by Camberwell Press and the Royal Mail.
During 1999, the Royal Mail issued a series of 48 stamps, two per month, which celebrate the millennium by illustrating one thousand years of British history. “The stamps are very beautifully printed, so we decided to hand-stick in real stamps as illustrations, sitting them on a perforated ‘timeline’ that runs throughout the book. Then, we needed to add the words,” Webb recalls. (Text for the book was written by Michael Benson.)
The text that would accompany each stamp was poetic, yet in each case indirectly suggested the subject of the image (many of which were rather abstract). The breakthrough moment about how to set the text came, Webb says, when he and his designers realized they could do the same with type. By setting the text in imaginative, illustrative ways, the combination of words and image could say more about the meaning of each stamp than either could have done alone.
Trickett doesn’t always set out with the idea of using type as art, but he finds that it actually happens quite often. Used with intent, illustrative typography can communicate in a meaningful way that piques the reader’s interest. But it doesn’t work at all when the type is just a picture, he cautions: the viewer looks for messages that aren’t there.
The choice of typeface is crucial, too. 1000 Years, 1000 Words is set in Foundry Journal, a modern British sans serif. Sans faces – especially Gill, says Webb – often work better for these sorts of applications than highly decorated faces, whose abundance of detail can get in the way of the visual concept.
“Look for the feeling of what the message is, not just what it’s saying,” Webb advises on using type as illustration. “The big mistake, unless you’re making stand-alone art, is to lose the message in the medium.”