IMRAM Poetry Festival
The brief for this college project was to represent the meaning of a poem through typographic treatment. We had a choice of about seven poems. I chose one called 'The Yawn' becuase it spoke to me visually. I could see the potential to play around with the concepts of darkness, touch and movement. The poem is about a blind man on a traffic island waiting to cross the road.
I wanted to show through text and image that there is movement and things happening going on either side of the blind man on the pedestrian island. I started experimenting by moving paper on a photocopier machine. The results were very evocative and interesting but they needed further development to increase meaning. So I went into the darkroom to experiment further using analogue techniques. I printed the words of the poem on acetate, cutting them up and moving them around while they were being exposed. It took a lof of experimenting but soon I was getting good results and happy accidents.
The letters at the top look like blobs but are still recognisable as letters. I also liked the way they look a bit like braille. And the letters at the bottom right ended up looking like dark shady figures. A blind man is aware of the world but can’t perceive it as seeing people can. The whole look and feel was designed around impressions and limited senses which is why I went with B&W as my ‘colour’.
The letters at the top look like blobs but are still recognisable as letters. I also liked the way they look a bit like braille. And the letters at the bottom right ended up looking like dark shady figures. A blind man is aware of the world but can’t perceive it as seeing people can. The whole look and feel was designed around impressions and limited senses which is why I went with B&W as my ‘colour’.
