Form and Content 4

Katie Wrobel
Typography II
Section 001
The work I chose is from the Typographic Design section of the AIGA website design archives. The piece, titled Taking Things Apart… by art director/designer Steff Geissbuhler, is a poster for an event called “Taking Things Apart and Putting Things Together” sponsored by the American Chemical Society. The content of this piece concerns an event about chemistry and is informing people about it so that they will attend. The form of this piece relates to the content in the way that it incorporates the idea of chemistry; the display type used for the event title is broken into pieces, literally showing the idea and title of the event: taking things apart. The piece is visually interesting mainly because of the design of the display type. There are a variety of type styles used to emphasize its broken up scheme and two colors are used to further distinguish some letters. Each word has exaggerated kerning on both ends of the scale to add more to the idea of taking things apart and putting things together. Another interesting visual element is the directional line. The display words are not placed directly under each other, yet are far to the right or left of the word above them. There is a small area of space near the center of the group of display type where each line overlaps; this overlapping of the words creates an imaginary diagonal line from the top left to the bottom right of the page. In addition, the separated placement of each display word adds emphasis to the direction of the text, which creates another directional element perpendicular to the aforementioned imaginary line. The fact that the display type is spread out in this fashion rather than being fit into a text box adds visual interest as well. The directional lines that are created with the type placement add a great sense of movement to the piece. Unity and variety are both evident in this piece: unity in the same font being used throughout and variety in the difference in type styles and colors. There is also repetition in some of the combinations of letters. Emphasis is placed on the display type especially due to the bold white letters that draw the viewer’s eye to that area. The type relates to the image because the majority of the letters of the display type are found on the periodic table of elements. The letters are broken up and spaced apart from each other based on what letters make up an element from the periodic table. Each letter or letter pair from the table have the element that they represent typed underneath them. This allows the type to directly relate to the image as it is a direct tie-in to chemistry, which is what this poster is telling us about.