Project: Oxymoron

When I look around at other folks’ blogs and see postings of what they’re working on, I love it when they talk about why and how they did it. So here’s my attempt.

Project
Our assignment in Typography class was “Oxymoron.” Some of the ideas I had were: science fiction, virtual reality, dull roar, Advanced Basic, bitter sweet, business casual, quiet storm and sound of silence. We were to illustrate, just with type, each of the words of the oxymoron.

Various things that came up in critique:

• How do we say the phrase? Is it “home office” or “HOME office” or “home OFFICE.” This gives us the emphasis.
• Let type do the acting.
• Lowercase is relaxed.
• “active energetic font” (though I don’t remember which it was but I liked this phrase)
• Be interpretive with type. Use its voice.
• Freezer burn: maybe burn around the edges and add depth. Maybe snowflakes.
• Transparencies always create depth.
• We want realism; things to relate.

It was amazing how many had the page divided in half. The teacher said that mine was a “nice solution” and “clean” and though I divided in half (I didn’t… it was purposefully not exactly half), the black of “virtual” makes it look like it’s not.

Mechanics
I did virtual in lower case because that’s usually secondary to reality. However, when I say the phrase, I put emphasis on virtual. The top part of the page is busier with the binary code scattered about with different layers and various transparencies. I lined up the “i” in virtual with the “r” in reality because I thought the negative space of the “r” looked like an “i” and to line up on the “v” was boring. The “i” is Impact in both words and stands out because a person (”I”) makes virtual reality. “Virtual” is AmericanTypewriter and “reality” is Impact. I wanted “reality” to look like those HardCopy type shows. I think I succeeded since one of the students said that my design looked like something you’d see in a magazine for a story.

And then..
I like this solution. I wonder what it would look like if “virtual” were all upper case and “reality” lower. I also started the one for “science fiction” but it flopped horribly.