Brief: to design a typographic glossary of 24 terms, that could give the user the fundamentals of typography, be it a designer, a student or a lay person. Colours were restricted to black and one other of choice.
Concept: Typography, at the outset, had a very traditional aesthetic. Glossaries also typically follow a boring format. I wanted to design a type glossary that was visually engaging and sustain the user’s interest.
I was particularly interested in the Dada art movement for their unconventional typographic design. A notable characteristic of Dadaists was their manipulation of the aesthetics of typeface and composition in order to create meaning, independent of the content itself. It involved explosive layouts which broke the traditionally regular rhythm of typography by using multidirectional typesetting and typefaces of widely varying grades.
The type is arranged on the page in a way that attempts to convey the meaning behind the type terms even before they start reading, in line with Dadaist principles.
Excerpts from literature that loosely connected with the type term were used in showing working examples for the definition, in order to sustain the user’s interest in the glossary.
