TYPOGRAPHY PORTRAIT

My main approach for tackling the typography self-portrait assignment was to utilize text that I felt was evocative of my personal attitudes and characteristics.  While brainstorming ideas for the project I immediately thought of the work of French Renaissance writer/philosopher Michel de Montaigne and in particular two quotations from his work titled Essays that I wanted use. The quotations are as follows:

“To win through a breach, to conduct an embassy, to govern a people, these are dazzling actions. To scold, to laugh, to sell, to pay, to love, to hate, and to deal pleasantly and justly with our household and ourselves, not to let ourselves go, not to be false to ourselves, that is a rarer matter, more difficult and less noticeable.”

“Aristotle reputes it the office of magnanimity openly and professedly to love and hate; to judge and speak with all freedom; and not to value the approbation or dislike of others in comparison of truth. “

These quotations are especially compelling for me personally because they reaffirm a few philosophical values that I have always contemplated, but hadn’t necessarily been explicitly reinforced by an outside source until I read a portion of Montaigne’s work. My hope was that I could “kill two birds with one stone” by using one-word snippets of the quotations (referenced above) in order to both display the fundamentals of Montaigne’s message because I feel it is incredibly eloquent and relevant to my life, and also so that I could create a representation of the process by which experience has shaped my thoughts and attitudes. The words I used were: scold, laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, judge and speak.

The image I decided to replicate for the typography project wasn’t incredibly important to me because I knew I wanted to focus on representing Montaigne’s words in a readable and clear fashion that would draw attention to the actual text rather than to my expression… I didn’t want my expression in the photo to delineate the portrait’s significance. That being said my expression in the original photo is somewhat silly, however, I don’t think it detracts from the tone of the piece because it is a representation my personality and me as an individual – while I do place value in the words within the portrait they don’t necessarily influence my mood or behavior all of the time. Generally all I wanted was a detailed and contrasted photo of my face so that the final product would be eye-catching.

I chose to use a variation of Helvetica called Helvetica Nue throughout the piece for several reasons. First of all I thought it would be appropriate considering how prevalent it is in design as well as within our society as a whole… the Helvetica video we watched brought me to the realization that there have been a ton of instances in my life when I’ve seen Helvetica and been influenced by it. Whether it was in a city while I was travelling, on a store-front, in an art piece, paired with a product or organization or even just included in the header of a random website I always enjoyed and thought well of things in association with Helvetica. The Helvetica typeface undoubtedly shaped my experience with those things, and I wanted my portrait to have the same effect. In addition, Helvetica is fairly easy to arrange and is visually consistent enough to be conducive to creating regions of dark or light values.

Lastly, all the text in the image is either point text created in Illustrator or text brushes I made in Photoshop. I decided to make the switch from Illustrator to Photoshop because I wasn’t really learning anything new by copying point text over and over, and Photoshop made the process a little quicker.

The first quotation I referenced above (“To win through a breach…..”) is actually written in the darkest part (text) of my eye. It probably won’t be readable on WordPress…

Here’s the original image compared to the final image…