Inspired by several campers’ lyric typography posters (2 stars), I decided to go back to this assignment. I passed over it during my design sprint because the first few ideas I tried didn’t work – I wanted to do something purely typographical with the background color being the only non-textual adornment. I couldn’t pull it off by myself. I didn’t really get the examples, which looked good, but didn’t always marry the lyrics and designs in ways I could grok.

My subconscious kicked around a few ideas – I wanted to do something with Radiohead; I played our Florence + the Machine CD on today’s drive to Grammy and Poppy’s.

Here’s what I came up with while working entirely in Acorn.

Florence + the Machine

First, I tackled this Florence + the Machine poster. I had originally thought about using inverted carrots to make teeth for the dog days, but then I decided to try coding some impact into the poster. I used a bold Rockwell font to lend weight and vibrancy to happiness and a few other bits of text. I threw in a bracket and a wide-stanced Bank Gothic font for the hit. I used Cracked (always stop at 3 fonts, Chad!) for “bullet” and rotated some forward and backward slashes to suggest a spider-web of stress fractures from a bullet hole in the middle of the “b”. I also left “bullet” in all lower case to contrast it against the other lines of text which are all capital. Finally, I kerned the last line to -12 (I go past the absolute value of 11) so I could have the text wind back on itself and fit the bottom of the page. I also split it into “in the b” and “ack” so I could make it wind back in a less predictable way. I like the gap. I think it helps punctuate a kind of hard return and possibility of escape up or down the page in the recursive loop that the last line creates. Maybe that’s where the happiness-bullet hole is.

I also worked on a Radiohead poster combining the colors and sans-serif-ness of the In Rainbows album typography (I used a bold Euphemia UCAS font) with lyrics from “Fake Plastic Trees.”

I decided to repeat the line about the town getting rid of itself, omitting one word per iteration so that the quote would get rid of itself. I put the text in a box that takes up most of the page, sized the text to fill the box, and let the line breaks take care of themselves to approximate the random aesthetic common to many pieces of Radiohead art and web design. I love the way the last line doubles itself while disappearing itself. The last bar of background is white to complete the vanishing and create some ambiguity about whether or not there is anything there in an invisible, white font.

Here’s the poster:

Radiohead

I’m very glad I found a way back into this assignment. Thanks, ds106 campers! Learning in community!

In gratitude, let me share this wicked pair of multi-layer stencils of Thom Yorke that a student did as a learning project this year.

Thom Yorke stencil art from a learning project