I am driving a car with broken head-lights.
My initial iterations were an attempt to find a connection between the typographic form and the body form. I knew I did not want to steer into territories of expressive typography or the Sagmeister-esk use of the body and typography. So I started to look into some of the suggestions from the 2nd week’s tutorial. Body adornments, jewellery, make up, tattoos etc. After a series of iterations I drew letterforms to mimic the shapes and structures of the human form and arranged them in my 21 instagram posts to create a humanoid silhouette. Even though the shapes drew from the rhythms and shapes of a letter form, they failed to be legible or identifiable as letterforms.
This raised several questions:
What are letter-forms? What is a symbol? And what value/meaning do they hold outside of the alphabet system?
It seems to me that there might be some relationship between the legibility of a letter form and its relationship to other letterforms within a typeface. The recognisability and legibility(can they be used interchangeably here?) of a letter form might be dependent on its neighbouring letters in a word.
Collective meaning and the Gestalt Principle:
Even though the shapes failed to communicate meaning individually, they did contribute successfully to form the human silhouette. Could this further illustrate that letters (that are just shapes) can only carry meaning when they are part of a system. Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts.