Ideas Crit

Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended

Bauer Bodoni

1

Choosing Bodoni as my base font gives the text the feel of authority, which is a contrast to my word ‘sarcastic’ so I’d aim to deconstruct the traditional looking serif font. Looking at the etymology of my chosen word I’ve discovered it derides from the Latin meaning of sarkazein “to strip off flesh”. I will therefore strip back Bodoni and alter the serifs, possibly inverting them and I want to mainly play around with Italics. I want to alter the font in uppercase, emphasising the ironic importance and reverse the Italic. Tom Driberg recommended that ironic statements should be printed in italics that lean the other way to conventional italics. So by manipulating Bodoni, sarcasm should shine through with the alterations of the traditional serifs, these will be put possibly at a 45 degree angle, slanting downwards which would also suit the reverse italic format. 

Here is an example of a Reverse Italic font: 

2

My second idea is to play less on the letterforms, but rather adding to them; using the font Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Bold Extended. To draw attention to the letters ‘F’ and ‘U’ for obvious humorous reasons I want to experiment with the idea of intonation and accents, as when people say sarcastic things it’s usually identifiable by their tone of voice, the pronunciation and elongation of certain letters or sounds may reveal sarcasm from a seemingly innocent phrase. Playing with this ides, I want to experiment with umlauts on the ‘F’ and ‘U’ as well as other uses of punctuation altering vocal inflections. I would like to also include the ‘Irony Mark’ or ‘Percontation Point’, being the reversed rhetorical question mark. I believe the bold simplistic Berthed font could be metaphorical for a standard tone of speaking, almost a monotone voice; psychologist Clifford N. Lazarus described sarcasm as being ‘hostility disguised as humour’, therefore the only way of knowing the personality of the font is sarcastic and hostile is from looking at the punctuation.

For this task we had a time limit in which we had to sketch pictograms for our chosen word, it made me think about how it can be visually represented without considering the physical typeface.

 

Then passing our word around to others, they had to create their own versions of 'sarcastic' pictograms:

I particularly like the last one, the jagged edges symbolic of a harsh criticising tone of voice represented in some kind of sound waves looked good, my serifs may look better if they were reminiscent of this. 

Then another person had to create ten possible versions visually of the letter A in five minutes. 

Of all the 'A's my favourite is the elongated sleek one at the bottom as it looks like it could've been authoritative but has been stretched too far, almost like a mockery of the traditional style. Another favourite again being the one to feature jagged sound like waves, this really brings across the idea of tone and verbal intonation which can impact the meaning of words so much. 

I really like the idea that some of the feedback suggested in terms of combining my ideas but using the backbone of the first one with the reverse italics and altering the serifs possibly at a slanted angle, with the addition of the umlaut or some form of punctuation above the 'F' and 'U' to alter tone. I feel this will really encapsulate the personality or sarcasm, the idea gathered also from the feedback of having angular sharp serifs will aid this. I furthermore really like the idea of having very little spacing in between each letterform to emphasise confusion of meaning, by distorting the legibility we find it harder to read, as we would find it hard to pick up on verbal sarcasm if it's unclear.