Visible Voice

This Project was for a typography class where students wrote short stories as if they were telling them to a friend.

Printing

This Project was for a typography class where students wrote short stories as if they were telling them to a friend. Students then had to typeset the story across six pages in a dynamic way so that the story could be read either each page indivudally or as a long single page.

InDesign File

The opening page, its lines indented at varying depths to score the rhythm of speech: “Last summer, I was working at Penn as a Research Lab Assistant at a rat lab… It was a Friday or a Saturday — I can’t remember — but I had made no plans to go out.”

A page describing being talked into going out: a friend, “we’ll call him Will”, invites the narrator to a club downtown, and “I should just come out.” is set letter-spaced across the page as an aside.

A page beginning “The night was off to a good start”, then narrowing into an argument between the friend and his girlfriend on the dance floor that they decide to move outside.

A page weighing two options — follow them down and third-wheel the argument, or stay upstairs and dance — ending with “t h e y ’ r e g o n e .” set wide and alone.

A page beginning “NO ONE is outside, and I’m like”, running through unanswered texts, the bar closing in thirty minutes, and the decision to start the forty-minute walk home.

The closing page: ten apologetic texts waiting at home, the narrator telling the friend it wasn’t a big deal, and the last line set alone — “Now we look back and laugh about it.”

I wrote about an experience I had going out with a friend a few years ago that I felt had a good length and pacing for this project. My goal for the typesetting was to use text density to indicate the pace of the story. I used character spacing to show critical points in the story and draw attention to key plot points. I also wanted to represent the erratic development of this night through the zig-zagging type that gives the pages a chaotic but continuous appearance.

Printed Prototype

The same printed piece laid flat on a black surface in raking light, the accordion folds catching the light as a long pale band of text.

A photograph of the printed piece standing upright on a black surface, its concertina folds opened into a zig-zag so the typographic pages step away from the camera.

Laser Printed 8” x 42”