Aaron Bell

One of the projects that particularly stuck with me was to create purely graphical treatments of words. We took a provided word and ignoring the meaning, instead focused on the shapes that make up the word. I was assigned “mandatory”. I first saw the word was made up of a lot of round elements and so I first experimented with turning all the letters into circles. However, after working through those shapes, I didn’t like the results and was stuck repeating the same design over and over. Setting aside the work I did with circles, I decided to look at the word from a new angle and different direction—I began focusing on lines. I thought the straight vertical lines had an interesting feel, especially in all-capitals, but as “MANDATORY” featured so many diagonal lines, they seemed a better direction.

Working with the letters drawn into triangular shapes, I rotated alternating ones so reduce the amount of space between each letter, eventually combining the parallel lines of each to merge the letters together. The overall look of the design had potential, but something was still missing from the graphic.

At that point, I decided to explore compression of the design, both vertically and horizontally, to see if it became more compelling. I tried horizontally first and, while I liked the result, it still was not compelling. Vertical compression proved to have more character, resembled a circuit board or subway map.

After returning from Type Camp, I continued with this exercise with the various words around me. It proved an effective way to keep creative and explore how letters worked together. Some of my more interesting creations were “bubble”, “music” and “clinic”.

Similar to “mandatory”, “bubble” was another word where I wanted to try circles at first, but then became more drawn to the vertical lines. Looking at the repeating shapes, I saw that, except for the ‘u’, all the other shapes could be normalized into a repeating pattern. The ‘e’ and ‘l’ could imitate a ‘b’ by bringing them together but leaving a crossbar in the circle to be reminiscent of the ‘e’. The ‘u’, on the other hand, could not be integrated that way. Instead, I worked to combine it with the stems or place it above and below the other letters. After looking at it more, I began to see the ‘u’ like a slur in music. Then, the ‘b’ became a musical note and I knew I had an interesting design direction. Stylistically, I made the first ‘b’ a quarter note and the second two as eighth notes. Finally, the ‘le’ became a half note that is sitting on one of the staff lines. While the design isn’t that readable, it has a certain life.

Another word I thought developed well was “music”. Starting off, I was immediately drawn to the ‘s’ and worked to use that letter to drive the character of the overall word form. However, after a few iterations, I could not find an appealing design. The next direction I explored was based on segments of circles. That created some interesting shapes, but the overall word did not mesh together well. After a couple of tests with verticals, I went back to a more calligraphic look for the letters, merging them together with a single line. My initial iterations were overly flat, but over time it became taller to allow for more curves and a lovely shape. In particular, I liked how the ‘m’ turned more into a heart shape—it reflects an emotive response to music, a feeling of which I greatly approve.

A third word was “clinic”. I went through many iterations in the creation of this word and it is the one that changed the most. The first quality I saw in “clinic” was that it was nearly a palindrome, so I investigated how I could reflect that near symmetry through the graphical form. Thinking vertically, I quickly came up with the ‘ini’ ligature that would get repeated through many iterations. Then I worked with how to bring the ‘cl’ and ‘c’ in to work with that ‘ini’ set. After a number of tries, I dropped the round curves on the ‘c’ and moved more toward geometric looks at the letters, using straight lines and squares as the focus. Still, nothing was working. At that point, I became experimental, re-orienting the letters into vertical arrangements and creating interesting designs that looked like something out of a science fiction film. After making the design more and more complex, I discovered a way to simplify it into three core squares that would represent the word; ‘cl’, ‘ini’ and ‘c’. The final version of the word brought the three squares together and mixed the letters together so much that it became nigh unreadable. In the end, I like the simplicity of the final version, but find myself more drawn to some of the intermediary steps, with their increased complexity. Ultimately, this is one of my most successful of these exercises, not because I achieved the best end result, but because throughout the process I was forced to rethink my methods and preconceived notions about how the letters should come together and created a large number of interesting designs.

These kind of exercises are a wonderful way to spend time and I often find myself doing them when I need something to do. Best of all, they help me flex creatively and see letters as not simply gateways to meaning, but as shapes in and of themselves.