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.