ABSTRACT TYPOGRAPHY

This project is a typographic experiment. All letters are basically figures that over time have been stylized and abstracted. The characters in most alphabets are no longer recognizable as the figures they started as. In that sense, all text is already "abstract", so this title is really a contradiction in terms.

Many graphic designers and typographers have probably experienced the exercise of creating abstract typeface-images in their training. The Swiss typographer Adrian Frutiger (1928–2015) experimented with pure abstract forms throughout his career. He took as his starting point naturalistic studies and stylized and abstracted them until they became completely free forms. But he never put them together in any system or alphabet. In stead he made independent art with these shapes. Although he made images with completely abstract graphic forms, Frutiger always kept a link to the literary through titles that led the mind to something concrete.

In these graphic experiments, which I have chosen to call “Abstract Typography”, I have worked with the idea of doing the opposite of Adrian Frutiger — that is creating completely new character sets based on series of abstract graphic figures with no concrete references. The characters are designed with a view to having a visual relationship, but not resembling anything concrete we know from nature.

I assigned these characters places in the alphabet, then assembled them into a typeface and created a font that i installed on my computer. Then I wrote words and lines of text with this “abstract font". This page shows a few extracts from this work.

This project is closely related to semiotics, but is more about focusing on the function of typography in visual communication than sign-using behaviour. The abstract typography has its own expression that communicates by virtue of its shapes and colors. The purpose of this is first and foremost to create graphic exercises, where I seek to train the eye and challenge my self and the reader to see the text in a new way.

[Mads Nordtvedt, october 2022]