GDE750 – Week 16

Expanding the Visual, Cultural and Contextual Foundations

This week marked the beginning of a more focused transition from essay writing into the visual research phase of the Studio Practice. Although the Critical Report is now complete, I realised that the Studio Practice demands its own form of inquiry, one that builds on the academic foundation but translates it into something more applied, contextual and visually grounded. Because of this, much of the week was spent revisiting sources with a different purpose in mind: not simply to study them, but to understand how they can actively inform creative decision making.

I organised the research into clearer thematic categories and deepened each one. The first theme, Dialect, Language and Visual Culture, required me to rethink how dialect functions as a cultural artefact and how this might translate into typographic form. I revisited authors like Crystal, Hall and Johnstone, not for academic writing this time, but to extract visual principles that could guide the practice: rhythm, variation, emphasis, irregularity and tone.

The second category, Neutrality and Standardisation, became more important when approaching the Studio Practice. I explored the work of Müller Brockmann, Vignelli, Pentagram and Unimark again, but this time I analysed what is visually lost when design prioritises neutrality. This reflection helped reinforce my intention to design outcomes that resist standardisation and instead embrace cultural specificity and typographic character.

The most valuable part of the research this week was examining visual practitioners who use typography expressively. Designers such as Aries Moross, Marion Deuchars, Greg Bunbury, Paula Scher and SnoozeOne provided concrete examples of typographic voice, showing how energy, rhythm and cultural narrative can be embedded directly into letterforms. This set the foundation for how my own studio work needs to behave.

By the end of the week, I had built a solid research base that feels directly relevant to the practical work that will follow. The research is no longer just supportive context for the essay but an active tool guiding the direction of the Studio Practice.

TUNE OF THE WEEK