This project focuses on typography and the simple building blocks of design – point, line, plane. Other elements such as Illustrative, diagrammatic, iconic and photographic content should be avoided.
Choose one Article from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and present it in a manner which you feel fits the text. Where words or phrases are more meaningful than others they should be presented more prominently in your final piece.
The Futurist typographical revolution began in 1912 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote his first “parole in libertà” (words in freedom), works in which words have no syntactic or grammatical connection between them and are not organised into phrases and sentences.
Futurism was born in a period of turmoil as a revolutionary movement that sought to renew every art form to keep step with the technological and industrial innovations that were emerging. Futurism emphasised speed, technology, youth and violence and the things that embodied these qualities, such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city in general. Traditions of the past had to be left behind to focus on the dynamic present.
Futurism’s graphic revolution did not stop at the page, but encompassed the whole book. In the twenties and thirties, the Futurists’ graphic experimentation extended to the form, binding, material and printing technique used for books, which became objects of art in their own right.
In 1927, Fortunato Depero, the Futurist painter, sculptor and designer, published Depero Futurista, a collection of his typographic experiments, advertising posters, tapestries and other works. Depero Futuristarepresented an evolution in the Futurist typography movement began by Marinetti, and was the first book-object.
Packed full of daring graphic experimentation, innovative page layouts and work from every artistic discipline, Depero Futurista is also known as the Bolted Book because it is bound by two large industrial bolts.
The Dada influence on typography broke with most printing traditions. It had a radical attitude toward design and took typography seriously; it was a necessity, not a side effect. An anti-bourgeois outlook took form.
Typography during the Dada time period became a significant part of the Dada time period. Following their “no rule” rule, the Dadaist would rebel and protest all that would be normally approved at the time and reinvented the way type was used. They would use as many different fonts as they wanted, would punctuate in unconventional ways and loved to drop random letters or symbols throughout their pages. They would also print both horizontally and vertically on the same paper, composing indifferently in any direction. Visual impact became a vital part of their posters and every page had to explode since they wanted it to “yell” at the viewers. They achieved this with extreme hierarchy, very heavy use of capital- lowercase, condensed, and light-semi-bold type. Also, some of the Dadaist would rather have their text not be dependent on the meaning of the text. In most of the posters, the legibility of the text would more than likely suffer.
