JAMES VICTORE
TYPOGRAPHY
"I do not embrace typography. I respect it well, and nod appreciatively in its direction, but will never give it a full hug and bro-like pat on the back. It is not a mistrust I speak of, I am just wary and eye it as I would a door to door salesman or a Williamsburg hipster with white-rimmed sunglasses. Typography for me is never how the words look. For us visual ladies and fellows this is, of course, almost inverse thinking, but, follow me, my thought is this: it is what words sound like. Each choice of different face is a lilt, an accent, it gives a word a slightly different vibrato and pitch. With this in mind, words become emotion, or even the very lack of emotion. Words, depending on our choices of font, have meaning, irony, force, a palpable whisper, possibly even empathy. We, being in charge of typography, and not the other way around, cannot let a typeface, with its own cultural baggage, depict what we want to say. We don’t lean upon cursive to mean “fancy,” nor rest up on old-reliable stencil to mean “travel” or “war,” and so on. We often spend endless hours looking for that “perfect-meaning” font, deep inside knowing that there is none and our choices ultimately come from fatigue or downright laziness."
James Victore's work is unmistakably his. Every one of his pieces bears his handwriting. Few designers have done more to render typography foundries irrelevant than Victore. The human hand, his hand, is always in evidence. Yet this signature approach takes so many different tones. His work conveys the sense that the words don’t want to wait around to be put into type, justified, and kerned. Instead, the ideas are rushing to get out.
No comments:
Post a Comment