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A5 booklet
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Intertextual exercise on the postmodern design movement of the 1990's.
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"Mixing characterizes the social life of design. Visual communications elicit divergent responses in a crowded landscape of competing messages." (1)
— Ellen Lupton
Reading is a dynamic exercise that appeals to our memory and incites our imagination. A text is not just a text. It is the beginning of a construction that brings together words, images, sounds and sensations. As stated by Michel Foucault (2), a book has no limits, because text is simply a knot in a much wider, broader network of references. This associative logic explicitly refers to the concept of intertextuality. Therefore, the value of a message is not enclosed in itself, but in the possibilities of combining and recombining with other messages, through the processes of decoding and re-decoding promoted by the act of reading. Deconstruction, as introduced by the literary studies of Jacques Derrida in 1967, corresponds to the process of structurally dismounting codes and conventions. This offers alternative arguments when exploring graphic and typographic language. Mixing Messages was an exercise of experimentation that consisted on exploring new possibilities when it comes to formulating a graphic speech based on the possibility of selecting content and generating new meaning through a refreshed visual. A critical reading of a few relevant essays on graphic design in the scope of the issues addressed to in this semester was promoted and the students searched for ways of developing a critical analysis that would put the specificity of each text into context and would amplify their potential meaning, opposing them to other references (textual or visual). The primary goals were the design of an editorial proposal (in the form of a booklet) that would illustrate the concepts of intertextuality and deconstruction as presented above.
(1) Lupton, Ellen (1996); Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture; New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
(2) Foucault, Michel (2002); Archaeology of Knowledge; London/New York: Routledge.
— Ellen Lupton
Reading is a dynamic exercise that appeals to our memory and incites our imagination. A text is not just a text. It is the beginning of a construction that brings together words, images, sounds and sensations. As stated by Michel Foucault (2), a book has no limits, because text is simply a knot in a much wider, broader network of references. This associative logic explicitly refers to the concept of intertextuality. Therefore, the value of a message is not enclosed in itself, but in the possibilities of combining and recombining with other messages, through the processes of decoding and re-decoding promoted by the act of reading. Deconstruction, as introduced by the literary studies of Jacques Derrida in 1967, corresponds to the process of structurally dismounting codes and conventions. This offers alternative arguments when exploring graphic and typographic language. Mixing Messages was an exercise of experimentation that consisted on exploring new possibilities when it comes to formulating a graphic speech based on the possibility of selecting content and generating new meaning through a refreshed visual. A critical reading of a few relevant essays on graphic design in the scope of the issues addressed to in this semester was promoted and the students searched for ways of developing a critical analysis that would put the specificity of each text into context and would amplify their potential meaning, opposing them to other references (textual or visual). The primary goals were the design of an editorial proposal (in the form of a booklet) that would illustrate the concepts of intertextuality and deconstruction as presented above.
(1) Lupton, Ellen (1996); Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture; New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
(2) Foucault, Michel (2002); Archaeology of Knowledge; London/New York: Routledge.
