Truth and Typography was created and facilitated by Liese Zahabi, Assistant Professor of Design in the Art & Art History Department at the University of New Hampshire. The project was conducted in the Spring semester of 2022, and the participants were the 15 amazing students enrolled in ARTS 610 Principles of Typography. You can learn more about the design program at UNH here.
This project began as a response to a call for proposals from our campus’s newly formed Global Racial and Social Inequality Lab (GRSIL).
The lab gathered proposals for a wide variety of projects across many different humanities and arts disciplines connected to the theme “We Hold These Truths….” These projects were showcased and shared at a public event held in April 2022 in Concord, New Hampshire, and participants included faculty and students from universities and community colleges across the state.
The “We hold these truths” project focuses on poster design as a lens to interrogate the use of typographic messages to inform, to persuade, to convince, to mislead, to provoke, and to question. This project included the following:
- A historical analysis of posters, exploring a variety of visual examples, reasons people made and displayed them, and how they have been used by artists, governments, organizations, activists, and businesses.
- A tour of related materials held at the Museum of Art here on campus; the museum has a wonderful collection of prints that include typography used in various artistic ways; specifically, they offered to display 3–5 prints that feature text and that relate to the themes of truth; including access to these works allowed the students to see real, tangible artifacts that they could connect to their own creative ideas and processes.
- An exploration of specific design strategies that have evolved over time to create visually arresting and engaging posters and messages.
- Students were asked to conduct research about poster designs as they relate to this idea from the call for proposals, “How is truth depicted, contested, and explored through visual mediums?” This research lead to a short slide presentation that organized the student’s research in a visual way, which was shared with the full class. In this way, students are able to dig into a specific pocket of research, but still learn about a wide array of ideas in a short amount of time.
- Students were also asked to conduct research in small groups about one of the prints displayed in the Museum of Art and to give a short presentation about those works.
- As a full group, the students looked for patterns in all of the examples of poster designs and prints we explored, and brainstormed categories to describe the different ways THEY see that posters have been used (both in the past, and contemporarily) to depict, contest, and explore truth.
- Finally, students were asked to choose one of these class generated categories and design their own message and poster.
