Deconstruction Task

Typography just used to be about a way of communicating the spoken word, letters joined together to form words, creating a body of text. A way of visualizing language. As Lupton says in ‘Thinking with type’, ‘typography helps readers navigate the flow of content.’

Before print everything was hand-written which made each piece of text individual, with flaws and changing features from one to another. However once print was introduced things changed, print ‘helped establish the figure of the author as the owner of a text’, there becomes a sense of completion and creates a sense of authority to printed text but however closes the work off and gives it singular meaning.

Text is designed so that the reader reads in the order that they are told to follow by how the page of text has been laid out, even though they reader is made to feel as if they aren’t reading at all.

Since print typography is know normally set out in a standard format which some people claim makes it closed off and leaves no room for interpreting meaning but this said, how can we not say that each individual will read something in the same way. Features such as page numbers, index, footnotes, headings seems to make a book a set sequence of pages laid out in a way that is to be followed.

Barthe’s model of text states ‘the importance of the reader over the writer in creating meaning’, creating the ‘death of the author.’ The author is not meant to dictate the meaning of a text, ‘reading is a performance of the written word.’

In the 1980s/1990s graphic designers started to experiment with the layout and form of text, meaning that ‘typography becomes a mode of interpretation’. Each change to a piece of typography can change its meaning and context, where as some words insist on meaning a change of typeface or typographic act such as the leading could change the content and read a different meaning.

Marinetti

 

This piece of typographic work is by Marinetti, this text shows the use of deconstruction within typography. The format and layout of the type creates a disjointed text that puts the reader in control, the abstract layout means each reader can inturprate the text in their own way, starting and ending at any point, creating paths within the text. It creates a sense of exspression and movement throughout the text