SOCIAL/ANTI SOCIAL/TYPES

This studio examines public typography and how it organises meaning across place/space. It asks how type circulates socially, politically, and rhetorically, and how re/classification, re/composition and re/distribution of type might offer new critical frameworks. Through site-based fieldwork and experimental publication, students will explore how typography mediates understanding – shaped by context, even as it shapes it in return.

Students will engage in situated fieldwork, speculative classification, commons generation and rhetorical analysis. Typographic observation and experimentation will be supplemented by relevant readings. Collaborative and individual work will support context-sensitive understandings of typography, its publics, and the understandings it is able to produce. Each student will produce three publications.

Students investigate how typographic choices (voice/scale/tone/composition/placement/colour/etc) can carry and complicate meaning. Working across three formats, students explore how typography functions in public space and how design decisions influence interpretation. We will emphasise the social context of type and seek out generative possibilities that come from ambiguous typographic form.

We will undertake field audits, generate a shared image commons, and create alternative classification systems. Students will produce an initial 24-page zine, which expands into a reflexive publication integrating original textual and formal experiments, and a large-format poster intended for public distribution/display.

Weeks 1–6: Phase 1 – Generation
Taxonomic Typographic Commons Zine
Students conduct a typographic audit, contribute assets to a shared class-wide commons, and develop an alternative classification system – one based on affect, tone, and usage rather than traditional formal categories. Each student produces a 24-page zine that documents and applies their idiosyncratic taxonomy.

 
Weeks 7–11: Phase 2 – Iteration
Expanded Publication
We will expand each zine into a longer publication using original/found text and site-based type material from the commons. It will include excerpts from van Leeuwen's Towards a Semiotics of Typography, legibly typeset, alongside more responsive typographic wildness and experiments that skirt illegibility.

 
Week 11 and 12: Phase 3 – Publication
Public Poster (SKO)
A large-format poster designed to return typographic research to public space, summarising a semester of work through visual and rhetorical strategies. The poster will both report on and contribute to type in public space.

Theo van Leeuwen : Towards a Semiotics of Typography
Jan van Toorn : Design's Delight
Lorraine Wild : Castles Made of Sand
Stephen Banham : Characters