PAGE SPECS: 8.5 '' x 11 ''

These are series of images that explore the concept of “semantic” typography, where a word as a picture presents a visualization of the meaning of the word, while also preserving its readability.

These designs were heavily inspired by the book, Pictowords: Semantic Typography, published by Niggli in 2005. It was a project led by German design studio, Baumann & Baumann, that collected pictorial words designed by over eighty students over eighty hours at Musashino Art University, Tokyo.

This was a very fun but a challenging task to undertake, as it required a lot of understanding and creativity to depict the semantic words in a a visually pleasing and legible manner.

Closely following the style of the book, Pictowords, the visualization of the words was done by only working around their letters and modifying them. This means I couldn’t draw out the visualization with a pen tool or use geometric shapes. The point of this was to find simple and creative solutions within the letters of each word that would create a compelling imagery. However, I did take the liberty of transforming each word through scale, rotation, opacity, repetition, distortion, color, composition, etc.

I produced over ten designs, with the words being in no particular theme or order.