Abstract letter series

Idea of opposition means presence but absence at the same time. Putting the same idea in context with type, I started observing the negative and positive space of each letter. This led to the question: is it possible to transform the negative space into positive space? I started this quest by observing different fonts. As ‘I’ says me, myself; I started observing different ‘I’s. The question was does it reflect different moods or phases of my life. Can I connect with different shapes of I? I selected blackoak standard font as it would bold and simple, seemed like made out of basic geometric shapes. To observe the negative and positive space, I arranged this ‘I’ in a pattern by repeating and rotating it several times. This resulted in a pattern, where the letter ‘I’ was lost to a certain extent and we could only see a design-pattern. I made a few more patterns with the same ‘I’. On observing the patterns carefully, I could recognize new shapes that were definable as letterforms. So what happened here? The negative space was turned into positive and the original positive space turned into negative. This exercise resulted in forming the entire series of letter shapes.

The letter shapes formed were free from the details of type yet had basic characteristic in order to be recognized as letter shapes. The newfound letter shapes are minimal and look abstract when seen individually. But when seen in a series, one can recognize it as letter shapes.

Disclaimer: The above artworks were a part of Student Degree Show-June 2011 at University of Bedfordshire