From the pages of my notebooks - Ideas that got the chop.

I wanted to do this but never got around to it. It’s one of the stupidest and most obvious ideas I ever put my name to. A poster with a tshirt shape and a tshirt with a poster shape. All nicely screenprinted and packaged together.

I have long had an interest in purely geometric type. I enjoy taking straight lines and pure curves and forming letters from them. I get really irritated by the oft-repeated typographic catchphrase “A straight line is a dead line”. No its not. Its the shortest, most economical, logical distance from one point to another. This is an early example of a face I worked on based on this principle.

Since then I have been irked by this piece. It is only legible when used as a titling face and is strictly incoherent and unreadable in any form even nearly approaching body copy. I began to wonder could a font be created that is entirely logical in its construction? It would need to be usable in all sizes and in any situation. FF DIN is about as close to this idea as I could find. Yet it still has its “illogical” idiosyncracies that help it retain some humanity.

I now want to design a font that reflects our concerns as a race going into the future – it needs to be entirely logical, can appear in print from small print to poster headlines, on the side of children’s bicycles to the side of a space fleet that travels the galaxy. Most importantly it needs to be economically minded in its use of resources, which is to say it must have as few lines as possible so as to use as little ink as possible. Where to start? Well, by trying to figure out what the essence of our alphabet is. How much and what bits can a letter afford to lose?

I made films for all these but for one reason or another I never printed them. Kinda sorry I didn’t now.

A visual explosion. Graphic intrusion. We are everywhere and you should be worried.

A little graffiti sticker discussion piece on the manufacturing of the paranoia and fear of terrorism. Like the second world war posters that told citizens the enemy lurked everywhere I thought the image of a mushroom cloud stuck up in various places would comment on how we are told to be always vigilant.

Terrorists aren’t everywhere and this wasn’t a very clever idea but I still like the image.

I had this idea to go around labelling things and photographing them. The label would refer to their defining characteristics and would be brief. The idea came from court reports where many people would have different recollections and interpretations of a single event. We all see the world in this way, through our own internal filters which restrict our view to that with which we can reconcile everything, not necessarily filters with which we are comfortable but we twist situations to align with our understanding.

I thought it would be interesting if this were stopped by clearly defining objects and events.