You can say anything you want, yessir, but it’s the words that sing, they soar and descend…I bow to them…I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down…I love words so much…The unexpected ones…The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until,
suddenly,
                they

                        drop…

Pablo Neruda

 

Typolitic presents some of the best typographic student work from undergraduate design and art courses around the world. This is the critical raw, formative stage of a student’s design education. Whether practical or speculative, these political projects may be the seeds of emancipatory practice.

Here students examine the visible word in the wider context of social and cultural constructs, and confront the deeper meanings of the messages they are communicating. The boundaries of word and meaning are explored. Taboos are transgressed. Trouble is made.

The familiar, latent typographic knowledge we all have as readers is uprooted for conscious application by designers. Typography becomes a path into expository interrogation, not just of form but context and consequence. Untested assumptions and prejudices are exposed and dismantled. Alternatives are born.

The blog itself also argues implicitly for the teaching of typography and design generally as an intrinsically political medium. And its basic ambition is to encourage many more of the kinds of projects presented here.

Students are responding to specific briefs relating to a diversity of educational goals and these are outlined in the introduction to each project.

For more about the project see ‘Why Typolitic’ on Design Online.