Author: fail_5uyf59

the power of negative thinking. 

In this project you will produce a series of posters that break the spell of toxic positivity, through a set of typographic failures.

1. 
find texts that succinctly, poetically, absurdly express the ideology of positive thinking. look for “motivational content”. look for “positive journal encouraging shiny quotes”. look for stickers on amazon,com. for instance. dig deep if necessary. remember that the bravest thing you can be is yourself.

find 10 texts.

as you go, play attention to the affirmative typographic form that accompanies this content.

2
typeset your texts. experiment with typographic forms that cause the meaning of the affirmations to fail, subtly or dramatically or hilariously or murkily. you might take cues from the original typography.

3
read passages from Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno and select some sentences whose content expresses, alternately, the power of negative thinking. 

4
make typography for these sentences that dialectically exhibits opposite forms from the typography you developed for your affirmations.

5
from these sketches, make a series of 10 letter-size posters that alternate between the two types of texts to produce a sort of essay or ode to the power of negative thinking.

1. Narrate an episode of failure in your personal life and/or your design life. Your narration can be either comic or tragic, but it should be one of these; or both. The failure could be “about” graphic design or graphic design could make an incidental appearance. Give thought to the sequence of events and aim to make their unfolding suspenseful. Think about the vibe you impart to the episode. Are we talking Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster or a funny home video? Give the narrative a title.

2. Karl Gerstner, in “Integral Typography” (1964) writes 

Integral typography strives for the marriage of language and type resulting in a new unity, in a superior whole. Text and typography are not so much two consecutive processes on different levels as interpenetrating elements.

Unity is reached in different phases, each successor including its predecessor:
— in the integration of different signs, different letters into the word.
— in the integration of different words into the sentence.
— in the integration of different sentences into the ‘reading-time’ dimension.
— in the integration of independent problems and functions.

3. Give your narrative typographic form on a single sheet of paper, in ways that fail to achieve the integration of language and type (of typographic form and linguistic content), at every level. This failure in integration is the failure of the typography to convey the meaning of the failure that your text communicates.

typeset the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

Create a website that doesn’t work. A website that is impossible to navigate. The failed forms of interaction can either compose a riddle for the user to solve, or be an exercise in delightful futility.

Fail to faithfully reproduce an image that is crucial to a political order that must be abolished.

Typographically (re)produce an impossible object.

Solve a basic typographic problem (one that already exists on your desk) in the most redundant way possible. See also Rube Goldberg Machine.