Garamond Corpus is a typographic study based on Geoffroy
Tory’s book Champ Fleury from 1529. In his book he makes
remarkable comparisons with typography and the human proportions.
I’ve made two posters containing various studies of the twenty-three Latin letters, their
proportions and function in an anthropomorphic form. My purpose was to examine the individual letter, its shape and
typographic qualities. Our letters have many characteristics comparable to the
human: there’s big and small letters, thin and fat, there’s an indication of
movement in the italic letter and every upper-case letter has a younger
sibling, the lower-case. Further there’s in every typeface something we call
families, and typographic styles can be seen as races with different qualities
and history. Within the field of typography we
have a definition for the different parts of the letter which is called
the anatomy of the typeface and partly reminds of our own anatomy: the letters
have arms and legs, eyes and ears, spines et cetera.
The title of this project, Garamond
Corpus has a double definition and besides its Latin meaning, “Body of
Garamond”, corpus is also a typographic measurement that is equivalent to ten
points. Garamond was Tory’s greatest pupil and was therefore chosen to be the
foundation for my research.
The work
can also be seen as a deconstruction of the letters roll as a representative of the language and places the
letter in a new context, as something organic and alive.
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