It is easy for us to relate to the communicative power of the material, because it’s something concrete we have viewed, touched, smelt or even tasted during our life. It’s something we have already built a relationship with. It is much harder to relate to a typeface. It’s something purely viewed. Very few people know how much time goes in to creating a typeface, and to the common man, its only task is to convey words. So is it possible to make the typeface communicate on a higher level than the material, and maybe make us disregard it completely?
I chose two materials; poop and gold. Both extremes on a communicative scale. I tried to make the poop look good and the gold look shitty through the use of typeface alone.
For “Posh Poop” I developed a classy ornamental typeface. A hybrid between neoclassical serif and a formal script. The poop is laid evenly with variation in width on the lettering, contrasting the ornamentation for legibility.
For “Grim Gold” I developed a crude and dirty humanist grotesque. I used angular lines to break up the flow, and a less consistent baseline. Breaking some typographic rules helped the piece look more rugged.
