As Graphic Designers, our eyes are honed to dissection type
and design. While typography remains a field of it’s own within Graphic Design,
the integration of type and design comes hand in hand in many cases. One field
we can see its prevalence in is music.
Starting with the Beatle’s “dropped T” Logo in 1963, which
like most great works was discovered by accident, music albums have
incorporated typographic elements into their artwork, and vice versa. This can
be said for many genres, but it seems no more prevalent anywhere than in black
metal album covers, where the type ranges from unreadable to offending as
designers.
Averse Sefire
Aborted
Gutted
Dissection
This is only the tip of the iceberg that is the integration
of art and typography in music, but shifting focus to a much more common field
for us all is logo design. You can see more clearly than others the integration
of artwork into the type. Thankfully for this portion of the blog, the focus of
this field is readability. Integration is subtle, sometimes so much so it gets
lost in the type.
FedEx – Space between E and x makes an arrow
Covering this leaves me with one field I cannot ignore any
further. While it isn’t a popular subject, Graffiti Art is the embodiment of
outsider artwork and typography. For many people graffiti conjures images of
curse words, gang signs, and badly drawn vulgar imagery, and while this is true
in some cases, for the most part graffiti artists shape, distort, and create
their own type in attempts of making a noticeable, readable, and aesthetically
pleasing piece. This ranges from “hand styles” that look no more than a
signature, to a 2-story mural that takes months to complete.
“Saber” – L.A. River piece
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