We express our thoughts in images and words. Both the miming and the written speech are images. A text-image. The recording of what we want to say. Fiction or nonfiction? It is progressively harder to decide. We live in an era when in the torrent of information we only catch glimpses of occasional sights, and rarely makes us a text think: why, that’s true!
In black and white... the idiom has remained a synonym for authenticity, when instead of the uttered sentences the written text recalls its original meaning, the one-time law. If we think of reality. The typeface is a fundamental part of the composition the typographer can create. It is a question of the designer’s attitude to what extent the sight will truly interpret the thought or whether the artistic expression will convey anything at all. It can, of course, still look nice...
In the Graphic Design Program of the Budapest Metropolitan University the emotional cognition of the typographic means of expression and their conscious application become more and more integrated in the pictorial world. The act of designing, problem solving and style come only afterwards. It is no longer only a text-image but a motion picture, sometimes even with sound. That is the complexity we strive for.
Poor Paul Gauguin said, “I shut my eyes in order to see!” How far have we come from that? With the expansion of the world, visual communication is also expanding. It is continuously growing and accelerating. Typography is information. It needs to be clear, as long as the information is also clear. We could say that it is not a question of our profession: we give wings to thoughts. And indeed, the phenomenon of fiction/nonfiction may harbour more and deeper answers. It is enough if we shut our eyes.
Professor Péter Maczó DLA,
Head of the Graphic Design MA Program,
Visual Communication Department, METU