Deconstructing Gender in a Typeface Design
jubilance
SOME BACKGROUND
Masculinity is always perceived as the incarnation of strength and power; it’s a stereotype. Just as femininity is culturally perceived as weakness. As a feminist, I’m fighting against this idea. Following the success of the widespread 2017 Women’s March—protesting the protection of women’s rights, including reproductive health care, LGBT issues, and equal pay—young adults have increasingly grasped a better understanding and passion for unity and human rights.
THE PROBLEM
In terms of design, the issue of gender equality in typography is two-fold; there isn’t enough representation, and thus non-male experience doesn’t feed into much of the design output.
MY STRATEGY
I developed a typeface for today’s nu-feminists—bold, ambitious, unifying, and denouncing stereotypical gender roles—that restructures gender separations and predominantly masculine tropes in typographical design. Therefore, by creating an androgynous typeface for both print and web, I homogeneously blended elements of strength and beauty, male and female, and ordinary and quirky that has a voice of defiance of today’s people.
Jubilance is characterized with a low stroke width contrast, creating a more uniform look, yet with slight humanistic characteristics—synthesizing industrial strength with organic sensibility. I utilized a reverse contrast style for the type's width to express a sense of eccentricity and oddity. I also maintained fairly open aperture and counters to literally express openness, clarity, self-expression and fearlessness. Instilling geometric and unapologetic sturdiness akin to singer/model Grace Jones (a strong influence on this type design), the axis of the typeface is appropriately fully upright.
Jubilance's shape is based off Grace Jones' androgynous form.
Jubilance's all–compassing message of love, anger, peace, and optimism attempts to solve the problem with gender as prescribed by how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.
