"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

Conclusion

As graduate-level composition courses and process movement ideals have abstracted composers from their places of composition, it’s important to resist these practices. Not only is recognizing the situatedness of a composer within their place of composition important in understanding the factors that influence their writing, it’s a way to avoid a descent into hyperreal discursive writing marked by intellectual generalization. In addition, the exercise may be introduced into undergraduate-level composition classes as an opportunity to recognize and visualize the cultural and spatial influences that may influence a growing composer's writing studies.

A more comprehensive understanding of how letterforms are produced and function lends credence to their inclusion in elementary schools around the country for the appreciation of the next generation of backpack-clad, new-squeaky-shoe’d future intellectuals. Typography, and the recognition of letterforms and their design principles, allows the opportunity for a composer to contextualize their place within locations of composition, while also producing an artifact capable of rhetorical analysis and argumentation, and if that isn’t enough reason, it’s also pretty fun.