Edinburgh Napier University

  Typography makes language visible as it presents material aspects of writing through a printed sheet and a printed book. In this presentation typography is a process of visualising one’s thinking while depicting a phenomenon discovered in the world – outside oneself. The phenomenon becomes visible through collaging found texts and visualising them typographically. As content and form merge, a dissonance is created between the real and the imagined, between facts and fiction. Found materials that contradict each other and that do not really belong together are merged into visualising the book cover.

My presentation depicts the process of designing a book cover for a non-fiction book. The process consists of a) several draft versions and b) the final version and the thinking behind choices and how they impact the final design. The artistic doctoral thesis that I discuss here was published in 2021 at the University of Lapland in Finland. The book is titled; Typographic enstrangment, Artistic research about transforming everyday words into typographic art. In this article, I will reflect upon the position between the creative event of designing and writing a book cover and show how the context of everyday life and society are placed into the writing. This article is written from the perspective of the writer, artist, graphic designer and artistic researcher.

As a theoretical framework I will borrow from literature theory and thinking of Gérard Genette who states that primary content is generally the narrative and the writing imagined in the mind. I will use writing of Briand McHale and his ideas of postmodernist fiction. The purpose of my research is to understand how theoretical frameworks shed light into the design process and further understanding of creativity. Cover design generally falls into the category of paratext. In my book design, typography, materiality, the imagined and the real world become a merged primary content. I will show how typography, text design/art, visual poetry and typographic language are primary texts it’s their right. The purpose of design is not to design the obvious, but the unexpected and the experimental: to untap the typographic potential.