Rome typography workshop
breaking down and experiencing type in roma, italia
Traveling to Rome, Italy was an experience unlike any other. The amount of history preserved and available the minute you walked outside your house was unreal. Locals sitting on old Roman columns like they’re benches or fountains that were thousands of years old and still function to be used for clean drinking water. This included old etched type in stone and local businesses signage. During our stay, we visited many historical sites like the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, and Roman Forum along with a few museums. Using these trips and the community around us we documented the type we saw and created a few projects inspired by those examples.
INSTRUCTORS - Abby Guido, Dermot Mac Cormack
INSTITUTION - Tyler School of Art & Architecture, Temple University, Rome
c. 2022
TYPOGRAPHY
AUGMENTED REALITY
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
EXPERIMENTING WITH TYPE AND ADOBE AERO
After gathering inspiration from the type that I found while living in Rome, I created a vector alphabet based on those examples [seen in the photos above]. Once each letterform was established I brought it into Photoshop and played around with the 3D tool. Some forms were meant to be readable while others were meant to be abstract representations of the architecture I noticed while walking around.
Given I was in Italy for seven weeks, I wanted to send something special to my family back home. Postcards were everywhere, whether they were in cheesy merchandise stores or small cafes. I carefully selected the cards based on what I thought would suit each family member and friend the best. Needless to say, the selection wasn’t the most diverse and not always the best designed. So I thought why not make my own? Using what I learned from making the alphabet above, I utilized that experience to create an interactive 3D exhibition through Adobe Aero. For this exhibition, I combined sound and image to teach travelers common words in the Italian language. The photos featured on each stamp were taken by me while at the Venice Biennale.
Each postcard features a common greeting used in the Italian language. I felt these were some of the most important words to know when traveling to Italy, from an outsider’s point of view. The challenge was to include the pronunciations, not just phonetically, but audibly. When you get to the back of the postcard, tap, and the stamp will appear along with a sound byte of the pronunciation. Grazie!
