"Contextualizing Place as Type: Creating an Auburn Typeface"

Harry Lewis

Harry Lewis is earning his degree in the Masters in Technical and Professional Communication program at Auburn University. His interests include visual rhetoric, typography, and the intersections of marketing and tech comm. Before attending Auburn, he received his BA from Saginaw Valley State University (MI). He is currently searching for jobs in marketing or UX, and enjoys dogs, hockey, and bad jokes.

Contents

Introduction

The State of Location in Composition

Typography as Rhetorical Argumentation

Typography as Expression

Design Perspective

Design Inspiration & Methodology

The Typeface & Design

Design Parameters

Conclusion

Works Cited

Introduction

My perception of letters and the alphabet harkens back to distant memories of grade school. My backpack loaded with new pencils (colored or otherwise), crayons and markers; my new shoes for the year squeaking beneath me. As my mom whisked me into the classroom for my first day of the year, I always noticed one specific element of adolescent academia that carried over from each new classroom to the next: the alphabet.

The same string of “Aa  Bb  Cc…” and on would be placed high upon the wall, hanging above the whiteboard or the window (sometimes both). Writing and letters hold a prominent place in both academia and industry, and we find them practically everywhere in our day-to-day lives. Whether communicating via conference paper, presenting a technical report, or advertising a brand on a billboard, letters surround us.

So why is there not more focus outside of technical communication on why typefaces[1] are designed the way they are, and how they can be unique, versatile artifacts for rhetorical analysis and discovery? Or, as I will later demonstrate, identifying the situatedness of a composer within an environment? This paper explores the possibility and importance of typography influenced by spatial rhetoric as a practice and rhetorical argument for locating a composer within their place of composition. I then put my findings into use to create a typeface representative of Auburn University, my current place of composition.

To answer this question, I had to consider how typography (the designing of typefaces) can be used as a unique opportunity for rhetorical argumentation and analysis, as well as a means for a designer or rhetor to locate the influences of their place of composition upon their own work. In my analysis I will be using Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) conceptualization of space as socially produced through lived, perceived, and imagined representations of a location. To Lefebvre, the classification of a place is a result of the topological nature of the people and things within a designated observable area and their interactions upon one another. The lived, perceived, and imagined representations of observed place can be largely subjective, resulting in spatial representations that are unique to the observer.

This social phenomenon is notably demonstrated in places with transient populations (such as colleges), where a stream of different ideologies are continually occupying a site before leaving and allowing entry for the next group of occupants. A perceived demarcation of academic places from the “real world” environment outside of academia results in the need for a liberal perspective when setting boundaries for analyzing campus environments.

My academic journey has taken me from an undergraduate institution of roughly 8,000 students, flanked by soybean and sugar beet fields in mid-Michigan, to a charming southern school of 27,000, surrounded by a town that thrives off the culture and prosperity of the University. This academic culture shock plays a significant role in how my surroundings influence my composition process, which will be explored further.

Throughout this paper, I will be presenting frameworks and theories for interpreting spaces rhetorically. I will then take my interpretation of Auburn University’s campus and synthesize it into letterforms. Following the creation and analysis of the typeface and design choices, I will present an example of how this exercise may be introduced into undergraduate composition classes.

 ___________________________________________________________________

[1] Typeface is the proper name for letter forms – what most people refer to as a “font.” However, font is the measurement of the scalable sizing of letters in a typeface.