Interaction Design · Project 1 of 3 · Weeks 1–5
Typography: Warm-up Assignment - Found Letterforms
Learning to see type in the world before designing with it
FORMAT
Individual
WEEKS
1
METHODS
Photography · Letterform observation · Compositional selection · Adobe InDesign layout · Print production
TAGS
Design Thinking, Design Education
Why this project
This assignment opens the course by establishing the first and most fundamental skill: looking. Not glancing, not recognizing — looking. The letterform that most students walk past every day without seeing is the same letterform they will spend the semester learning to draw, set, and compose with intention.
The assignment draws on a tradition of typographic observation that runs from the Bauhaus exercises in basic form through the Swiss photographers who documented industrial letterforms in the mid-twentieth century. Wolfgang Weingart asked his students at Basel to find and photograph typographic forms in their environment before working with type at the drawing board. The principle is the same here: understanding how letterforms exist in the world — in materials, at scales, in contexts — sharpens the eye in ways that working from a type menu cannot.
The Brief
PROJECT PROMPT
Using one of your initials, document at least 25 examples of that letterform in the built environment. Find different type styles — uppercase, lowercase, serif, sans serif, italic, bold, dimensional, painted, neon, cast metal. Crop each image so the letterform fills the frame dynamically. Take the crop to the edge of legibility — we should be able to identify the letter, but just.
Arrange your nine strongest images into a 3×3 matrix, 7.5" × 7.5", no gaps between images. Consider how the nine images work together as a composition: color relationships, scale of the letterforms, unity, and variety across the set.
The goal is to see type as a formal object in the world before you begin designing with it.
DELIVERABLE
Minimum 25 source photographs
9 selected images arranged in a 3×3 matrix, 7.5" × 7.5", no gaps
Final composition: 8.5" × 11", portrait orientation, printed
InDesign file (.indd) and exported PNG
Labelled: Lastname_Firstname_Exercise1
What I've learned from running this
This assignment has opened the course since 2005. In that time, it has not needed significant modification, because what it asks of students does not change with technology. Finding a letterform in the world, deciding how to crop it, understanding what makes nine images cohere as a composition: these are acts of seeing that no tool can perform on a student's behalf.
What changes is what students photograph. Earlier iterations of the course produced compositions heavy with signage and storefronts. Recent iterations include more found letterforms in texture — letterforms pressed into concrete, painted on asphalt, worn into metal. Students who look more carefully find more interesting things. The assignment rewards attention.
The most consistently strong work comes from students who treat the cropping as a design decision rather than a documentation task. Students who crop to the edge of legibility — where the letterform is recognizable but barely — understand something about formal relationships that students who photograph the entire sign do not. That difference in understanding carries through the semester.