Staff Lecture 4 - Jon Spencer - 20/11/13
Jons Grandfather used to work on a Lino Type setting machine so from an early age Jon was intrigued by Typography. He said as a child he used to sit for hours just drawing type and that he also had a catalogue of all the typefaces available in as Letraset transfers; I thought this was awesome.
Jon created a very interesting typeface, made up of just one single glyph. He used the process of Moire, where dots and lines are layered up onto of one another to create a pattern. The single glyph used was a pattern of dots. This pattern was layered up multiple times to create words, forming a usable typeface from the one glyph; not readable of course!
I was also very intrigued by the book he made called 'Fifteen' after he moved into his new house. The house hadn't been lived in for a number years and was quite derelict. The book contained scanned images of aged floor boards and peeling wall papers etc and was only printed on one side of the paper stock, in black and white. The use of a scanner to obtain the images instead of a photograph showed up much more of the detail on the surface and the result was impressive. The book was also filled with a timeline of all the people who had lived in the house in the past. I was really inspired by the clean layout of the book.
Amongst the type and the book making, Jon is also interested in photography and showed us some beautiful time-lapse videos and an interesting video which mapped Wi-Fi signal strength through the use of photography.
Overall, the lecture was really interesting and I have picked up some essential information that will help make my work much stronger in the future.
"I don't want to be interesting, I want to be good."