Typography, especially in the digital age has allowed readers to stop reading, with the introduction of things such as hyperlinks. This is also aspirant for physical books as well with contents pages, and page numbers etc. As well as this punctuation can be used to highlight specific areas of text, allowing a reader to jump around a page.
Punctuation and spacing is vital for the legibility of a piece of writing to be read as speech, the alphabet denotes the sounds made but the way in which its said is completely defined by the punctuation. The spacing of a text also allows the reader to flow through the text, so a classic deconstructionist trait is to alter spacing to confuse the reader and change meanings.
Before the introduction of print and digital text, books and texts were handwritten, as a result, due to human error, there were mistakes made in the reproduction of texts, taking into account, translations and the tone of voice used by the copiers, which in turn affect the way it is read by the reader. However with the induction of print into, mass production, all copiers would become the same, even if mistakes were made in them. As a result people would read the same tones, and conversation.
However with the introduction of the Internet, web texts have seen huge popularity. This in terms of deconstructivism, has taken a U-turn. As web texts are obviously written by many different people, and can also be altered over and over. This creates problems in the way text is read on the web. The introduction of print helped, authors become the owners of text this was reiterated with the introduction of the copy write laws.
Roland Barthes presented two opposing models of writing, in relation to the linearity of text, these were closed, fixed work versus the open unstable text in Barthes view, the work is a tidy, neatly packed object. Print is considered by Barthes to create perfect text. Barthes saw navigational features of a book, as attacks on linearity.
Barthes believes that the reader plays the text, reading is the performance of the written word.
The image above is by a designer called Allen Hori, who attended Cranbrook academy in the US, famous for being at the forefront on deconstructionist design. The title of the piece I am analyzing is “typography as discourse” which means typography as speech through words.
Typically with deconstruction, you are not immediately drawn to a start point of the piece, unlike that of a piece of text, where you are told where to look. This piece leaves the reader to choose where to begin interpreting it.
The typography used on the image is unstructured, free from any graphically excepted grid, its pushing the boundaries of legibility.
The spacing used is also a strong indication of deconstruction, with again inconstancy in spacing between letters, words. This makes the image harder to interpret for the onlookers. The image used on the piece, also draws you away from text, which feeds you the purpose of the poster, so this could also be considered deconstruction, as it is only making the piece harder to understand.
Through out this image, there is irrational and spontaneous layout, pushing the boundaries of what is graphically accepted, and legibility. All these are typical features of desconstructivist design.
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