Since the restart of the school year back in August I have been working on a quite extensive art and language project with two of the third year groups (aged 14) that I teach. Essentially it is a design module that focuses on the fonts and typefaces but has involved:
- A photography assignment
- A black and white, graphic typeface design assignment
- A painting assignment exploring more painterly approaches
- A poetry assignment
- Digital illustration assignment
- A page design/layout assignment
Often with such a long drawn out assignment the challenge is to keep the energy going, but in this case, with the diversity of activities, I have never felt that to be a problem.
A brief summary of the art and design activities and a few of the results:
Typeface design made using found objects
Create a coherent font using objects that you find at home. Arrange at least five letters that clearly belong as a set and make use of the same types of objects. The most significant challenge here is to get the pupils beyond the stage of using five pencils lying on the table to spell out a set of easy to create letters. There are so many possibilities but it does require a kind of mental leap to bring the pupils to a point where they start to see the design possibilities.
Typeface design using only black ink
This is the most purely design related step and before we get as far as using the ink we go through a series of design steps that first involve sketch designs of three quite different design ideas. One of these is then chosen and a series of design refinements using different types of letter are made. Finally we arrive at the ink work where a series of five or six letters from there font are inked in using brush and pen work.
Painterly letters
After the graphic work of the previous assignment things become considerably looser in this coloured in and painting assignment as the pupils build on and further develop their design work.
Poetry assignment
To include a significant language element into the assignment I ask the pupils to chooses the names on at least two typeface names (and there are so many to choose from!). These names, be they Broadway, Cairo, Baskerville, Freestyle, etc. are the starting point for the creation for writing a short poem. The names of the letter types have to actually be a part of the poem’s text, and ultimately when the poem is presented for marking the typefaces referred to must be used.
Peter Sansom 