Typographic haiku : collaborative experiments

Isherwood, T; Kendall, J

Abstract

About sixty graphic design and creative writing first year BA students attended the launch of the Typographic Haiku Exhibition currently running in Project room 3.33 in MediaCityUK campus till Friday 28th February, a project set up by Tim Isherwood and Judy Kendall with their first year creative writing and graphic design students.

Haiku and short poems written by the first year Creative Writing students in the first six weeks of their first semester were handed over to the new Graphic Design students to work on, also in their first semester.

The Graphic Design students created typefaces inspired by particular haiku and then fashioned them into posters and artists' books.
For the writing that had been fashioned into posters, the design students were asked to respond to the haiku - the feeling and subject matter - and design their own typeface without using specific images, so representing what the writer have created purely by typeface, colour/shade, position on the page.

Those fashioned into an artist's book were displayed so the viewers could touch, feel, and open them out.

The turnout of students and the conversations that occurred at the launch between both sets of students were proof of the exciting creative and poetic potential this exhibition has already highlighted. Creative writing students in particular were amazed, impressed and inspired by the dedication of the Design students, marvelling at the care with which they had reinterpreted the written pieces and the breadth and imaginative scope of their readings, especially in cases where the same haiku had been worked on by different design students to extraordinary and contrasting effect.

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Start Date: Feb 20, 2014
• End Date: Feb 28, 2014
• Online Publication Date: Feb 20, 2014
• Publication Date: Feb 20, 2014
• Deposit Date: Dec 22, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 22, 2016
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This exhibition and corresponding body of work is the outcome of a collaborative project between Level 4 Creative Writing & Graphic Design students, and aims to be the first of many such further initiatives between the two courses.