Deconstruction in Graphic Design

Lupton, E, 2008, 'Thinking With Type'

http://www.papress.com/other/thinkingwithtype/resources/TextEssay.pdf


'A classic typographic page emphasizes the completeness and
closure of a work, its authority as a finished product.'

Although it would be logical to say that good typography exists for the purpose of enhancing readability, Lupton observed that in fact the opposite was indeed true, that typography serves to help readers avoid reading. Designers work with typography and layout in order to allow the reader to clearly identify entrance and exit points, as well as clearly navigating the reader through the text in the correct and most efficient way.

A sense of completeness as a piece of work is also delivered by the designer, particularly when regarding printed texts and screen-based text. With printed texts, typography becomes a major concern, and due to this a lot more time and care is put into the process of completing and finishing the work. This in itself generates a certain series of voices for the work, not only that of the author, but also of the designer who arranged the layout, but also of the typographer who designed the typeface(s) used. It is possible to say that one of the main roles of the designer is to give a voice to the text that is characteristic of the author, to represent him or her in the correct way. As a result of this, however, is that there results in very few possible interpretations of the text - the completeness and correctness of it lead to the conclusion of only one possible meaning.

Typography also serves a number of other very useful purposes. The most logical spacing and sizing of a block of text allows the reader to absorb the information at their own pace, and perhaps take in the information in the order that they choose. This can once again be interpreted in one of two ways, on once hand it could be argued that this allows the reader to influence their own interpretation on the text, but on the other, it can also be argued that once again the typographic decisions made only add another voice to the author's text, reducing the possible interpretations to that of the author's own and the designer's input.




Hori, A, 1989, Typography as Discourse

As a piece of typographic design, it is possible to argue that theories of Deconstruction apply heavily to this poster. It certainly conforms to the most common of interpretations of Deconstruction in graphic design, if it were meant to be looked at as a labeling of style or attitude - which in fact it is not - the text is chopped up, layered and transformed in such a way to question typographical norms and standards. It was argued by the philosopher Jacques Derrida that the Western world is governed by opposites, and one of these opposites that he was particularly concerned with was the opposition between speech and writing, stressing the point that writing was in fact an inferior use of language compared to that of speech. This poster seems to be a challenge to that idea, the design decisions made seem to be influenced by such a statement. The arrangement of the type is massively abstracted; it becomes very unclear as to where the eye should be reading first, perhaps leaving room for more interpretation by the reader, something which Derrida argued was missing from normalized typographic styling.