ARTWORK

Stories not used “The Sonnets 18”
2024

6 x 9 in

I started my career as a graphic designer and was heavily influenced by Swiss-style typography. Therefore, I have been thinking about how to make the typeface itself a contemporary work of art, rather than using it as part of a contemporary work of art.

The typeface designs of Nicolas Jenson and Claude Garamond, as well as Giambattista Bodoni, Jan Tschichold, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, are all fruits of the highest human creativity, each based on a specific aesthetic sense and design philosophy. However, only typeface designers can interact with those ideas, and most people are unaware that there is an clear idea behind each typeface.

Also, human communication is a combination of sounds, gestures, and facial expressions, but letters only record sounds. However, most of human histories have been recorded by letters. There must have been a vast amount of information that was lost before it became a written language.

Fortunately, today there are many font editors that allow us to create our own fonts. We also have sophisticated digital recorders, sonograph software, and image editing software. I decided to create a font set using those tools, and from the sounds that surround the clearly audible words, but which have fallen out of the words. This is a metaphor for the fact that there are always unwritten voices around the voices that have been recorded in written form. At the same time, the font set itself has the possibility of becoming a contemporary work of art.

This is the work about what has spilled out of the words used to tell History. Letters on the screen are figures extracted from sonographs of the alphabet read aloud, just before and after the letters are pronounced. Shapes similar to the letters corresponding to the sound are extracted and entered into font editor to create a font set. This set has no kerning and all letters have square margins. This work uses this set to write out Sonnet No. 18, written by William Shakespeare.