Visualising words through design choices, to depict their meaning.
One of the many aspects of the graphic design discipline is the use of typography for visual communication. The artistic qualities of typography constitute the visualisation of written language for a commercial context. The recent acceleration in type design is resultant of the technological age whereby the main form of communication is through written language. In turn this has led to a rise in experimental type. Advancements in the software available for digital art has also meant that the methods and productions surrounding the visualisation of language has evolved too. Since the intrusion of the ever present LED screen, this has allowed for moving image / motion graphics / animation to be the new dominant form of typographic communication. Accordingly, this has seen a rise in designers experimenting with moving type and producing specialised motion graphics. More specifically on social sharing platforms we can see a recent trend for graphic designers mirroring the movement of type with its meaning - a sort of digital evolution from onomatopoeia and comic book days.
These new outlets for design and the digital visualisation of language, raises the question - are we increasingly lacking the need for social interaction, as tone and sensory stimulation becomes presented through other means?
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space between pairs of letters (kerning). The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Typography also may be used as a decorative device, unrelated to communication of information.
Examples:
Instagram influences
Here we see a progression in the ways graphic designers have chosen to visualise language reflective of definitions, from that of the onomatopoeias for comic culture. The evolution of media outlets and digital software has meant there is a populist forum of typography to thrive. Now the use of colour, type and layout and motion can be used to communicate adjectives and verbs, giving them new visual meaning in a way that was largely limited to onomatopoeias before.
Brook Griffin
Visualisation of Music through onomatopoeia
Overview
'The term “onomatopoeia”, meaning words which imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions that they refer to, is borrowed from language studies (linguistics) and adapted for use as a means of representing the sound, feeling and composition of music with words, word fragments and associated glyphs.'
The Greeks had a word for it, and we have borrowed it through Latin: onomatopoeia, the process of making words, which derives from onoma, a name, and a pooiein, to make. But we have extended the meaning beyond just making words in a specific way—by echoing a sound that is linked to the thing we want to name. English is full of such terms. Among them are repetitive childish imitations like boo-boo, choo-choo and bow-wow, and exclamations such as arch and ouch.
—Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, London 2001
Like music, visual animation on a video or computer screen happens in a single space. Even though there is a succession of images which might be presented as linear in a score—as it is in music—the experience is actually a series of replacements in the same space. The succession of images leaves a short trail in memory, enough to carry continuity.
—Kenneth Hiebert, Graphic Design Processes, New York, 1992
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