Just

When I was first given the task to find images and/or textures that worked well with my chosen typeface, I was lost. I was uncomfortable and inexperienced when it came to incorperating type and image and often found myself avoiding type altogether so I decided to keep things fairly simple and start off relatively slow. I started with taking the word by its face value which meant by using it as a word meaning 'to be exact' so I decided to place the word on a picture that was simple.

I then started thinking of words or objects that linked to the word 'just' and the word 'Justice' came up. When thinking about 'Justice' , America immediately pops up into my mind as with others due to being the centre of nearly every headline in recent months and therefore I decided that I wanted to incorporated the American flag within my work one way or another. At fist, I thought that maybe I should fill the actual type face with the flag and leave it at that but I realised that by doing so, the type and everything going on within the flag would clash, causing both elements to blend and non to stand out. With this thought in mind, I then proceeded to place the typeface on top of the American flag, concealing parts of it and at the same time taking elements away.I wanted my typeface to add negative space to the flag without over powering and I wanted it to seem like the image and type were on the same level. I decided to place my typeface mostly in between the middle rows of the flag as I wanted the 'S' to sit at a place where whilst covering some rows of red, it was not big enough to completely erase the rows. Furthermore, I wanted the top of the 'T' to partially conceal outlines but not overpower the imagery behind. I wanted people to take time to read the word and therefore I was mindful of not making my word obvious as subjects addressed by the justice system is not always black and white and often times the justice system's morals is questioned, therefore like my outcome, people would need to spend more time looking at the imagery to be able to read the word, hence my choosing to create my typeface in white.

Animals in captivity was another topic that came to mind when thinking about justice as there actually are pros to keeping animals in captivity as there are cons to animals being in the wild. However the reason why I decided to place the word 'just' onto a picture of a tiger in a cage as I feel like 'just' is what comes to most people's minds upon witnessing such animal in a cage. Hence placing the words onto the dark parts of the picture so that there was a vast contrast of white against black, making the word almost painfully obvious and therefore drawing our eyes towards it.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise as it allowed me to play and experiment with image and text and at the same time learning how images can enhance typography by leading the viewers eyes to it and vice versa.

After this workshop, I felt so inspired that I wanted to try and experiment more with text and how I can obscure them from view using different textures and colour.

I decided to use the same word however playing with the notion of "Typography in Denial". Because Just, in my case meant simplicity and being straightforward, by obscuring the text partially behind bubble wrap meant that no - this isn't as simple as people might have thought and therefore cause viewers to look and analyse into the text more.

I really liked how this experiment turned out as I felt that by layering text with texture, the type in a way gets combined into the piece and therefore does not stand out or look alienated within the final outcome.