Graphics - The use of Typography in Poetry

Our Graphics week has been directed around the focus of poetry. 

We started off the week by watching videos on design and seeing how graphics has been incorporated into them and how they attract our attention without us even realising as well as looking at the use of Dadaism in direct relation to graphics.

Dadaism: An early 20C art movement which mocked artistic and social conventions - it emphasised the absurd. 

We each brought in at least on poem which we enjoyed or felt we could reflect on. I brought in two, 

                             The Road Not Taken

                By Robert Frost 

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I love this poem as I think it represents reflections on life and how we always have more than one choice in life and sometimes we may not know which road/choice to make. I think this represents things that we do on any everyday basis as well as things that may have larger impacts on our life. 

“We should all be feminists”

Ngozi Chimamanda

We teach girls to shrink themselves
To make themselves smaller
We say to girls
“You can have ambition
But not too much
You should aim to be successful
But not too successful
Otherwise you will threaten the man”
Because I am female
I am expected to aspire to marriage
I am expected to make my life choices
Always keeping in mind that
Marriage is the most important
Now marriage can be a source of
Joy and love and mutual support
But why do we teach to aspire to marriage
And we don’t teach boys the same?
We raise girls to each other as competitors
Not for jobs or for accomplishments
Which I think can be a good thing
But for the attention of men
We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings
In the way that boys are
Feminist: the person who believes in the social
Political, and economic equality of the sexes

This is just a snippet of a 30minute long speech made by Chimamanda. 

If you have time you should watch the whole speech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg3umXU_qWc

-Though this relates to so many women this day I feel as a Black Nigerian woman I can really relate to this as it is about my culture and many questions and arguments I have with myself as well as with others having to merge my westernised up bringing with my african culture. 

We were later put into groups where we created poems that followed a Dadaist structure. We were given a sheet with instructions which we filled out to help us create our own piece of poetry. We had to write our thought down on what came to our heads on the topics of location, time and light.

Then working with the group of people on my table we went around and each said a sentence from our initial sheet to compose a poem based around Dadaism. 

Surprisingly my group did not have to re-jiggle any of the sentences about as they worked well in the order though we had not thought about its order beforehand. 

I think our poem did follow the dadaist structure as it felt incomplete in some areas though still worked as a whole. 

We later had the task of using words that we thought reflected our poems and using a typeface within the proximity of the boxes to deploy the word of our choice. We experimented with the use of space and how we would construct our words within these small boxes. 

I liked how we started off by experimenting in smaller boxes on one sheet as it meant you could see the layouts you had used before and possibly develop on form those or use contrasting layouts to your prior ones. 

I ended up just the word down and exploring different layouts which it could be deployed within the small area. 

Once complete, we all placed our words together and compared each others and different layouts people had used alongside the word used.

I was pleased with the outcome of my typeface as I had no idea what my initial outcome would be and I enjoyed experimenting with the word using different layout structures.