Ligature Strangulation

It was an unseasonably warm mid-March day; the prospect of yet another group project filled the class with trepidation. Bodies trembled and quivered as we were torturously allocated groups using an unforgiving numeric system. Lost souls congregated, united by their pre-ordained classification.

“Three!” we cried, “Three!”


With little more hassle, we united, ready for another rousing day of Type Radio antics.


The first task to be completed was a brief chat with our guest tutor, Catell. We sat, pallid faced, palms moistened, stumbling with words to fill the awkward silence. With very little idea ourselves of where our project was destined to arrive, we struggled profoundly with trying to explain our ideas to a third party. We chatted briefly about few ideas and left the experience with little more insight than we had taken to it.


The next pressing matter which urgently needed addressing, where were we to sit? Well, the obvious choice on this globally warmed spring was somewhere we could bask; dabble in a spot of sun worshiping while we pleasurably pursued our project.
Predictably enough we began a spider diagram, being careful not to utter the politically incorrect term, ‘brain storm’. Our first idea, being the rather banal image of a radio, or perhaps a typewriter; typewriter, radio, Type Radio, get it? Taking a rather vital blow in being informed we couldn’t include images, we toyed wit ha few slogans, “No images, just type’, but thought this portrayed the wrong kind of idea.


As a group with mixed ideas we pursued the only path we all felt comfortable on, the designers and artists that Type Radio spends it’s precious time and cyber space to inform us of.
After a recent InDesign session, with ligatures on the mind, the idea of these aesthetic characters floated to the surface of our consciousnesses. With the abolishment of images, the idea of using type as the decoration as well as the information seemed like a clever solution to an injustice.


We slaved hard through the day, fatigues slowly consuming our young, malleable minds, horror set in when we realised there were not suitable ligatures to fit in with our theme. Tweeking the wording to include some suitable letter combinations, we settled on the phrase ‘spoken words’, followed by on type radio, to iterate the website we were advertising.


With a list of over one hundred designers and a vague layout in mind, we experimented with text positioning, colouring, sizes, we started thinking about festival posters, something everyone of our demographic would be all too familiar with.


We settled on a design placing the text in a cascading format, the names of the artists starting big at the top and getting smaller down the page, and with a splash of colour our piece was complete, ready to be ripped apart by the rest of the class in a group crit.