A War of Type
A typographic matching game based on historical war propaganda posters.
A War of Type is a project I created in my fourth year of studies at Emily Carr University, and was exhibited at the annual Pop-up
Type Museum showcased in the winter of 2019, in collaboration
with Type Brigade.
As this project was part of my Advanced Typography course, my thesis for this 8 week project was to evaluate how image and typography work together, specifically how they convey certain messages based on the imagery the typography is associated with and how the interpretation of the type changes with and without its visual elements.
Image & Typography
Everyday, we are exposed to imagery in all areas of our lives. Advertisements, art, posters, photography—every visual element we consume overtime become a collection of visual artifacts that we relate back to our own life experiences.
Typography, on the other hand, is the design of letters that make up the words we write and speak. It is undeniable that imagery plays a significant role in typography, where it influences the expression of certain messages, emotions or feelings depending on certain characteristics or stylistic choices made by the designer. Both elements can work on their own: type as typography and image as art, but when married together the two elements create well-rounded design that send a powerful visual message to the viewer.
This is something to consider when viewing posters from the eras of World War l and ll. How did the imagery in the media influence the way display type was created? How are we able to view certain messages conveyed through typography when it is isolated from its original imagery?
World War Propaganda
World wars l and ll were arguably the most significant time in history for communication. Recruitment, political propaganda and other methods of conveying war related messages were plastered on every street corner, and was the turning point in time where poster design became a prominent form of communication. Since technology wasn’t the same back then that it is today, people use physical forms of communication as their primary method to circulating messages, which inevitably resulted in some very creative ways of communication and mastering how to communicate posters in a way that has a clear, visual and eye-catching message.
Therefore, the typography embedded into these posters also became a significant creative component to each poster. Each word that was written had to be highly visual and curate a message within itself stylistically so that even before you read the words you knew what the message was about.
For the most part, type used in these war posters happened to be drawn by hand, and some adapted from well-known type families. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to source an exact match of what typeface an artist or designer used in their original poster, and the examples shown are display typefaces that resemble what the designer or artist may have used, but are not to be mistaken for legitimate credible typefaces.
Today, we are able to find a variety of typefaces online that are “inspired” by the script or bold styles that emerged from the war eras, and it wasn’t until after 1945 that brush script novelty styles were introduced as proper named typefaces that one can refer to.
Overall, it is interesting to think about how some of these typefaces could have been interpreted by a designer, the decisions made to use the typeface with certain imagery and how the typography can contain certain characteristics within itself that reflect off of imagery.
Process
With this in mind, I decided to focus on War propaganda posters as an example to challenge this message. I went through a process of researching many different War Era posters, ones that were most recognizable, had a very unique slogan or worked very interestingly with the typography. Through my research I discovered that many of these original war posters contained hand-drawn illustrations, and the typography was majority hand-lettered. After choosing a variety of posters to focus on, I then attempted to match the poster’s typography to an existing recognizable typeface. It was very difficult to do this as many of these typefaces existed as script mockings of the original poster type, and were all very dependant on which war the poster came from, which country, which designer/artist created it etc. Nonetheless, I managed to track down 6 unique typefaces that were most-likely the “original” choice by the designer/artist, information about those typefaces and user-tested them to identify the general interpretations of their usage within the posters. I made sure to present a balanced variety of typefaces: 2 serifs, 2 sans-serifs and 2 script fonts so the audience could learn general typographic information as well.
The Game
As the goal was to create an exhibit that involved user-experience, I decided to create a matching game based on my collected research. I created my own posters based off of each original war poster that only showcased the typeface with the war poster’s slogan. I then went on to create 3 different “type cards” for the matching portion of the game. The first card showed a black and white image of the original poster without its typeface, and this was the card that each player would physically match to the large typographic posters. The second card laid out all the pertinent information about each typeface, and on the back those cards revealed the original poster design. These type cards were then mounted on wooden planchettes to add extra aesthetic value.
An obstacle I had to face with this game was making sure it was challenging enough, since a match could have been quite obvious based on the words. I made sure to choose posters that could be interpreted as a few different answers, and this is where user-testing became extremely important.
Therefore, the game was played by first matching each black and white type card to the corresponding poster that the player believed was the original typeface used. Once the user matched all the black and white images they could go back through each match, learn about the typeface and reveal whether they got the correct answer by flipping over the type card.
Exhibition Summary
The exhibit and game was a great success, and people became intrigued to learn more about these historical war posters through typography. In the end, it became an interesting project to register how we understand a message based on a designed composition, whether we first read the words written or process the visuals that we see, why we choose certain typefaces over others, how imagery affects the artistry of specific fonts and overall how having both elements is extremely important to art and design.
The final deliverables for this exhibition became six designed posters, printed at 18” x 24”, twelve 6” x 8” type card planchettes that were placed under each poster, game instructions, exhibition description and supporting showcase material.