ITAP Design Canons - week five

This week's lecture was about typographer Ragunath Krishna Joshi and about how using language in design was so important to him and how he used it in his work. He was described as an energetic man who never stopped working. He always had something new to show and encoded hidden messages in his work that only people who knew him well would understand. I looked at examples of the work of one if my favourite typographers, Luke Lucas, in order to see how the language used in his work changes it's feel. 


His work is mainly illustrative typography. I find some of the ideas behind his work really interesting and clever. He has influenced me in previous brief work. I think this is because his work is quite commercial and i am looking to go into advertising as a career. Below are some examples of his work.

This caught my eye because of how the typography has been designed in what the word says. Lucas has a very literal thinking process, he takes something and designs it exactly as it should be.

In this design, the typography is describing the taste of the image.  He could have just written the word  'wine' or something  in that typeface and put that in the glass, but instead he has written about the taste of the wine. This piece was used in a magazine article. Using illustrative typography in this way would have lured the reader in and made them able to relate to the article.

 This piece is similar to the hair piece in how the type is make out of what the word is. This is slightly different though as 'Crush' is the name of the yoghurt, If the type actually said yoghurt it would be the same principle. The two hands on the side of the type are doing what the word says by trying to 'Crush' the type, but this is a different meaning of the word crush. 

I think it is really clever how Lucas interpreted two meanings of the same word in his design. I would like to be able to design this sort of thing when I leave university. 








Hearing about Ragunath Krishna Joshi's design journey got me thinking about my own design journey and where it is going to take me. From my inspirations and design heroes it is certain that i am aspiring to work in the area of advertising. I find it interesting though how so many designers completed education in an area they thought they would work in and then ended up doing something completely different. 


To finish, a quote from the lecture that stood out to me was that 

'written music is a language'. 

As a piano player i can read sheet music and it had never occurred to me before that others who can also play were reading the same language as me. Although we may not be able to understand each other, we can understand the same sounds and music we hear and can have and share opinions on it. This has showed me the importance of looking at things from a different angle and thinking outside of the box.