part 1

a.
Read “Robin Fior” by Richard Hollis. Consider his work and biography and especially the different formal and material senses of revolutionary typography that Hollis elucidates for Fior’s work. What formal qualities does revolutionary typography exhibit, according to this account? Prepare to discuss this in class.

b.
Explore the radical graffiti instagram account. Pick three graffiti texts from among the posts. Transcribe them. Find texts that strike you as powerful, clever, interesting, poetic, or important. They should be related in some sense and work together as a set, as a list or as a paragraph. Their relation can be obvious or not, but develop a sense of how they work together and condition each other and develop a meaning together. They can clash or echo each other. Each text should contribute something new to the overall meaning.

c. 
Read “Futura, a Typeface of our Times.” Think about the arguments made for Futura as uniquely expressing qualities of the early XX century, and consider a contemporary typeface would be that had a similar relation to our moment in history. Think about what it means for a typeface to express its time. After doing this reading and thinking, pick a typeface that can function in this way. It could be Futura.

d.
Typeset your three graffiti texts together in a way that typographically demonstrates their radical/revolutionary content. Use “a typeface of our times.” Think about the ways typographic and design form can connect to political meaning according to Fior/Hollis. Make these form/content connections and/or propose a new ones in a set of three posters. Produce three posters that differently demonstrate these relations. Use the same text, and only these texts, in each poster. Each poster can reorder the three texts. Think about the semantic structure of your texts and how to give this typographic form.

part 2

a.
Read the attached passage from Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography.  Identify within this text three sentences that make a statement about typography or graphic design. Look for sentences that make a bold or interesting statement about typography and its relation to the present moment (the present moment of the writing being 1925). Or about the relation of typographic form to content. Another criteria for selection is that the sentences, when you read each individually,  should stand on their own. Look for a slogan-like power in the sentences you find. You might agree or disagree with any of the sentences.

b.
Typeset each sentence, as you did in the previous exercise, in a “revolutionary” way, that is: in a way that comes immanently out of the logical meaning of the sentence, rather than according to a form that is imposed from without. Be guided by the spirit of Tschichold’s argument about new typography. But also consider how typographic form can complicate or contest the meaning of its content. An additional constraint: typeset your posters in photoshop and find photoshop-specific forms (effects, filters, etc) for your typography. Dig into the software, which was designed for image editing, to discover new possibilities for digital typographic form. Finally, think about the relation of these three posters to your earlier three: altogether they should make some kind of sense together as a set.