I recently took a Skillshare class and it made me think of typography in a whole new way.
Usually, when I thought of type design, I always pictured perfect letterforms and geometrically sound curves, hoping that one day I would be able to achieve that level of skill as a designer. ‘Radical typography’, as James Victore calls it, throws all of that out the window.
So I experimented with a little radical typography of my own by writing a sentence with charcoal and smudging it a bit before I scanned it. I didn’t even bother to clean it up in Photoshop, since I wanted the marks and imperfections to show.
By inverting the above image in Photoshop, I was able to make a second version:
I like how it turned out. The style of the type adds a whole new context to the quote – and I’m all about context.
Sometimes it helps to look at things from a new perspective. My new perspective was that there really is no difference between ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ – it’s all just about how we perceive things. That, and the fact that perfection is overrated.
