BackTrack: "the?"


the?
Typography is often an ignored medium in the art world. We tend to toss around a font and the letters and characters of the alphabet and the keyboard in flippant ways. After all, what good is a '@' except for an email address or a '?' unless your asking a question? Well, for the fourth exercise I wanted the participants to look at characters a little more closely, so I assigned a typographic exercise to use only the characters in the short collection 'the?'.

How does one go about putting a good typographic piece together? There is no easy answer, as with all art it's a matter of feel. You have to look at what you've done and ask yourself if there is a better solution or perhaps an element that will make the image better. Perhaps the best way to start though is to examine all the elements that you plan to use. This may be difficult if you are putting together a piece of art with many elements, because the more you add, the more possibilities you are inviting.

Let's look at each of the elements I'm introducing in this exercise. First the lower case letter 't'. As you see it on the screen it is a standard typeface with a particular width and height and has certain relationships to all other letters surrounding it. But if you go into your computer's main Windows directory and find the fonts folder you may find you have many more options than you previously thought. You can also find these files with the Find command and searching for the file name '*.ttf' (for True Type Font).

In the piece below I've stuck with the standard Times New Roman font so that it would be recognizable by a great majority of people. The 't' has been used in a couple different ways. I've used it for both a kind of butterfly, by joining two t's together and as a faux quote by making them small and unassuming.

The 'h' I've used in the eye of the 'e' as a sort of window effect. Some windows are open and some are closed. I've accomplished this with a simple texture fill, which I've applied to the whole of the image essentially. The h's tie directly into the 'e' in fact. The e's I have used as containers to hold the image together. They were, if I remember correctly the first elements I put into the piece. They helped shape everything I did afterward.

The copyright of the article BackTrack: "the?" in Art Exercises is owned by Joe Jeskiewicz. Permission to republish BackTrack: "the?" in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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