Protest Typography
Our civilization is based on the alphabet and numerals. These elementary marks have no semantic meaning, but have been assigned roles as visual substitutes for speech sounds and arithmetic quantities. (Meggs, 1992)
…typography with its ability to corporealize language can be a capable tool of intervention against issues that concern us as citizen-designers. In order to understand typography’s capacity as a means for design activism there is the need to perceive typography as part of a greater system, –a network that includes written communication, language, technology, politics and society. (Özkal, 2016)
Typography, it seems to me, has a crucial role to play in capturing our thoughts and putting them out in the world. Often this is probably done without much thought – we just happen to use whatever is set as the default on our computer or device. I remember for a long time in the organisations I worked for everything was Times New Roman for day-to-day communication.
Having worked with a designer when setting up my consultancy business I am aware that the relationship between the typeface used and the message you want to convey is very nuanced. We worked through a series of questions around the tone I wanted to set, as well as practicalities like legibility and readability. The typeface was saying something important about me and the character of my business.
I would argue that typography has an innate power. I have been collecting examples of protest typography on Pinterest and it is interesting to see that in most images of marches in particular, the placards are ubiquitous. The protest typography I have looked at so far seems to have a number of common characteristics:
- It is designed to ‘shout’, to be big and bold
- It is generally black, although reversed out typeface, and sometimes red are also used
- Whether handwritten or printed it is predominantly all caps
- It is also generally san serif, with quite a slab typeface
- The message is usually conveyed as succinctly as possible – of the 117 images I have pinned so far the word count is generally between three and seven
- Some are ‘designed’ and mass produced, others are handwritten on found materials
Its role seems to be to reinforce an uncompromising point. A statement that makes it clear what the bearer thinks about the issue in hand and that this view often sits in opposition to what might be regarded as a dominant ideology. I think this is what Oskal (2016) is referring to when he talks about being watchful of the invisible actors in typographic communication. This leaves me with a question about whether typography in itself is benign, is it purely the application that positions it?
Letters in their attempt to confront letters, create a crack that makes us become more watchful; hence recognize the invisible actors in typographic communication. Typography can work with or resist these actors, but in whichever way, to use its capacity it is necessary to perceive typography in its relation with other systems, such as language, technology, ideology and politics. (Özkal, 2016: 8)
References
Meggs, P. B. (1992). Type and image: The language of graphic design: John Wiley & Sons.
Özkal, Ö. (2016). Letters against letters: Typography as a means for Design Activism. Paper presented at the 5T Design & Resistence Conference Proceedings.
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