In this one-week course we will be taking twigs and acorns and leaves from around the campsite and gluing them into patterns on painted boards, then pouring clear lacquer on top. Just kidding, that’s what I remember doing in summer camp arts and crafts class. In this week on type, we will look at the alphabet and explore how much fun it is to make letterforms fit into little boxes. We will be playing with letters and seeing just how flexible and (ir)rational they can be. This is summer camp, after all, so let’s have fun exploring new and crazy ideas instead of worrying too much about making your art projects perfect.

This course is composed of a series of three exercises. The first exercise explores the basic spatial mechanics of typography using a useful, personal, and surprisingly complex genre of information: the business card. We will begin with a minimal set of spatial resources, adding to them as the exercise progresses. Apart from editing the content of your business card, space is the only dimension you can manipulate in this project. This exercise focuses on the dimension of time. You will work with a single word of text whose basic location remains fixed within the space of the screen. Find ways to make the word appear on the screen that involve manipulations other than making the type change location. The second exercise invites you to think about animation by using attributes other than literal movement to create change on the screen. In the final exercise you will confront a larger body of text, which you will manipulate in both space and time. You will use the spatial resources explored in the first execise (leading, alignment, grid) as well as the temporal vocabulary developed in the second exercise.

Background image is composed of typefaces designed in
Peter Cho's course on Rational Type.