Making an art of everyday types and signs

New Delhi, Feb 19 (IANS) The humble arrow evolved from being a weapon of war to being part of everyday signage integral to life in the 21st century. It is in focus at a show here on typographic media, popular and graphic art named after the cult magazine Typographica.

The 10-day exhibition "Typographica" opened at the Triveni Complex in Sheikh Sarai and will be on till Feb 26.

"It tries to explore how we experience typography in our daily life - how our lives are dictated in types. The series on arrows is an example how the sign can guide people to different directions," designer Alice Cicolini, who curated the exhibition in India, told IANS.

Typefaces also draw the viewers' attention to the way newspapers have a shared language of communication, Cicolini said.

"But most publications, especially magazines, are abandoning typography in favour of photographs. The magazine, Food Illustrated in UK, tried to use typography on the cover of one of its issues last year. It was successful,"
the curator said.

"Emphatic Fist, Informative Arrow" - one of the exhibits - speaks of the everyday symbols that guide like pointers to destinies and destinations. The arrow and the closed fist with the open forefinger are both emphatic and commanding.

It was first published in Typographica, the journal for graphic art and communication nerds in 1965 as a photo essay. The text by Edward Wright accompanied a mind-boggling array of arrows photographed by communication maestro Herbert Spencer.

The arrows were photographed in contrasting contexts - as frayed signages on walls in Italy, on the asphalt of streets in London and Lausanne, on a pathway leading to a bungalow in Sicily, bunkers in Munich and a bank in Mayfair.

The arrow, as Wright wrote in the text, "became an essay led not by words but by the pictures arranged in a carefully constructed sequence". And in the process, the mundane sign elevated itself into a work of typographic art.

The Indian version of the exhibition "Typographica", which was originally curated last year as a media, advertising and graphic art show at the Kemistry Gallery in London, also features select editions of Seminar, one of the earliest journals on contemporary affairs that used innovative typography on its cover.

The bulk of the photographs on display have been shot by Spencer, who edited Typographica for 18 years. He published 32 issues of the journal in two series of 16 issues each.

In 1961, Spencer published two photographic essays to prove that British road signages were chaotic. The articles used typography as a tool of social campaign. They created a flutter prompting editorials in The Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement.

"Mile-a-Minute", a collection of photographs of road signs on the stretch between the Marble Arch and Heathrow in London, documents the disorderly barrage of prose experienced by road users en route.

"The hundreds of temporary or permanent, prohibitory, mandatory, directorial, informative or warning signs that assail the senses and sometimes guide - but all too often confuse the motorist along the relatively short route.."  Spencer wrote to draw the attention of the civic authority.

'Mile-a-Minute' spurred the British ministry of transport to set up the Warboys' Commission in 1963 to devise a consistent system of British road signs.

The exhibits that use typography as visual poetry, street art, number art on French fishing boats and newspaper art set the "taken-for-granted" types and symbols free from their doormat existence to scale new levels of creative expressions - niche art.