MFA Thesis Show

master thesis: I am interested in the creative process and how it informs our artworks —be it design, painting, dance... I was also interested in accidental creative; for example you spill paint on an artwork and like how it looks. Being a graphic designer I used typography as a vehicle to explore one aspect of the creative process — the process of designing a typeface.

Most designers take a very similar approach to the process, research, sketching, variations until the designer feels this is done — this is good.

The question I wanted to explore is what if that process was changed, subverted, maybe even let go of? What if I pulled back my aesthetic control and let chance or accident be my creative process. 

I came across some artists from the sixties that called themselves System Artists. They would write rules for how to make an artwork, for example pulling numbers from a hat and using a grid to inform where the lines are placed on a given surface. This is just one example, but the common theme is that the creative process is subverted from the artist's general aesthetic, or a regimented process is used to create. There are also many artists out there today that call themselves process artists. 

I used this and several types of “process” in different ways: drawing random numbers, using a grid, set of rules, writing an algorithm or letting the computer trace photos I had taken instead of me drawing them. By combining the rules and scientific methods, images were produced and letterforms were pulled from these artworks —creations. The results are in above type specimen posters. The KM typeface creatation method is explanied on the paper coloum in image 2.