Sreekumar Vivekanandan The aim of this workshop is to explore possibilities in storytelling and visual narrative by creative experimentation with typesetting parameters within specific restraints. Attendees will be tasked with depicting a given story only through typography, without using any illustrative imagery following the philosophy of “type as image.” An interesting story, which appears to be very simple, but has deep philosophical interpretations, will be given to each participant.
Students are encouraged to read and evolve a deeper understanding of not only the given story at the basic apparent level, but to also look at the deep philosophical knowledge hidden in the story. Participants can explore, experiment, and play around with various typesetting parameters like type size, orientation, position, style, weight, width, and grey value, etc. Such factors as font, paper size, etc., will be kept constant to achieve a basic consistency in the variety of design output created during the workshop.
The process of this workshop will encourage students to think out of the box, imagine creative ways of purely typographic storytelling, shed inhibitions of illustrative, direct, semantic ways of storytelling, and to look at creative storytelling through experiments with typesetting parameters with an entirely different and fresh viewpoint. This is a drastic change in approach from most of the design school education procedures and attempts to guide students to unlearn, experiment, observe, infer, and create their own visual language. Similar experiments were conducted by the workshop leader in a few events with very encouraging results.