Designer Bio

Whirligig
close up of hypnopaedia

more of hypnopaedia
color whiligig

So I have been looking and looking over the web for a designer that I felt best fit what I was doing. I really could not find anyone who I felt was capturing the same thought plan that I had. If I did find someone doing something related to me, I could not find enough information on them, or process and reasoning for their work. I guess this is a perfect example of why just placing a visual image of what you are doing is sometimes not enough for the viewer. Using process notes, and writing about your work can sometimes be very helpful to designers viewing your work. Enough with that little rant though. Today in class while the sophomores were touring our experimenting, Jamie mentioned the name Zuzana Licko to me. After looking through her typefaces, I think I have finally found the perfect person to write on.

Licko was born in 1961 in Bratislava Czechoslovakia. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1968. She went to school and graduated from The University of Berkeley in 1984. She became a part of Emigre magazine in 1984. It began to incorporate her typeface designs she created with the first generation macintosh computer. The exposure of her typeface design led her to create her to manufacture Emigre Fonts.

The particular fonts that I chose to use as examples to mine are: Hypnopaedia and Whirligig. I chose these because It has the "pinwheel" look to them. Whirligig is more of decorative illustrations, not leterforms. Hypnopaedia was first published in 1997.Each Hypnopaedia illustration was created by concentric rotation of a single letterform from the Emigre Fonts library. When repeated, each Hypnopaedia illustration creates a unique pattern of interlocking letter shapes. An infinate variety of patterns can be created by combining and changing the 140 illustrations. This next part comes directly from Licko: The catalyst behind developing the Hypnopaedia patterns was the lack of legal protection for typeface designs in the US. This continues to be a big problem for typeface designers, and is due to the fact that people in general find it difficult to comprehend letters as abstract shapes. It is this inability to distinguish between the ornamental design of letter forms and the alphabetic characters they represent, which has resulted in the lack of US copyright protection for letter form designs. By turning letter designs into texture, the Hypnopaedia pattern illustrations allow us to make this distinction and appreciate letter shapes on a different level.

It occurred to me that taking letter forms out of their usual context of alphabetic word composition, would illustrate that letter form designs have value as independent forms, separate and distinct from their ability to represent alphabetic characters. When applied within the context of pattern elements, the stylistic messages of letter designs are allowed to surface.

Letter forms are constructed as shapes of positive space, but of equal importance to their recognizability as representations of alphabetic characters is their enclosure of negative space as well as the white space that separates letters from one another to facilitate the recognition of words. Within the Hypnopaedia pattern elements, on the other hand, the negative spaces of the original letter forms are altered by rotation and by the positioning or interlocking of adjacent shapes.

When viewing two different letter designs of the alphabetic character "A," people tend to focus on the similarities between the two "A"s as they both represent the character "A." Some people might even express difficulty in distinguishing between the two "A"s altogether. Within the context of these patterns, however, it is clear that the patterns created from various "A" designs, for example, are in fact each distinct and separate in visual meaning.

Each of the resulting Hypnopaedia pattern illustrations was created by concentric rotation of a single letter form from the Emigre Fonts library. When repeated, each Hypnopaedia illustration creates a unique pattern of interlocking letter shapes. An infinite variety of patterns can be composed by combining and alternating the basic 140 Hypnopaedia illustrations.

Source: http://www.emigre.net/EFfeature.php?di=98