Gustav Hoiland

By: Gustav Hoiland

May 22 2010

Category: Uncategorized

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Welcome to another installment of type on photo. This time it went beyond simply placing and arranging the type. Yes, it’s gone into perspective! Three Dimensionality! A new avenue to explore/get better at, though I do like how this turned out.

And by this I mean this unbearably cute sad face. Gosh it’s adorable. A rigidly defined rectangular head with a frown that goes from one end to the other. And then the BULGING eyes that protrude from the plane of everything else, popping into a newfound spatial dimension. The more I look at it the more 3d it appears.

I’ll admit I’m not a master of perspective, yet. I was going for a perfectly perpendicular and consistently sized word, something particularly difficult to achieve here given the distance and seeming curvature of space. Look at the right cone. If you were to stick a pole out of there it’d go straight up in a certain direction. Now stick one in the left cone. Doesn’t it seem like it’s going somewhere completely different? I know it’s not, but it’s … well it’s an optical trick I suppose.

Finally I had to come up with a word/phrase. My first attempt was “Don’t be sad.” I was looking for a totally neutral typeface that didn’t yell it, tell it, or do anything but exist as those letters. I couldn’t figure it out. So then I switched to a more conversational “Hey now, Don’t be sad”… but that was too long. Finally the single word FROWN looked good.

And frown this poor little creature does. This creature that was in total darkness until it was startled by a blinding flash of light. I imagine it skittering away after the exposure. It’s … it’s just so creature-like.

Frown.