expressive typography

After reading "Watching Words Move", a book by Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar that displays the meaning of words like "adding" "stolen" and "half" and moving the letters around, stacking them, cutting them, adding symbols, subtracting letters... whatever they need to do to show tell the reader the meaning of the word.

I loved reading this, and so many of the ways they portrayed the words were so clever. One of my favorites was "automobiles":

Then we were asked to find at least three examples of expressive type on our own, and here are my findings.

DESIGNER: MATT WILLEY, the co founder and senior editor of Port Magazine.
This spread he designed, however, was for Futu Magazine. He is using scale and color to portray "Runaway Brands" in an interesting way. It looks like the letters are running away to the right of the page. He does this by making the letters dramatically bigger and smaller. He also uses color in a smart way. "RUN" really pops off of the page with the white on black, giving the beginning of the word a little kick off that portrays motion as well.

DESIGNER: JASON MANN
This poster was designed for a band named "Liars". Jason Mann cut up the letters to form a picture of the knife with the "I" seen in the word. He also used spacing and rotation to draw the eye to that part of the word, as well as using a different color for the knife to put emphasis on it, and still keep it a little hidden.

DESIGNER: "GORDORCA"
I love this example I found by Gordorca called "I speak alone". I love the way the designer pulled out this one sentence of the text that seems to define the whole block, and use it to portray the meaning. The techniques the designer used are spacing and rotation. The words appear to be falling to the ground, rather than traveling to the other person which is exactly what the text says. I also like the way the designer pulled a part some of the words and broken them/changed the size to represent them "crumbling" to the ground like it says in the text.