Typeface Promotion
A typeface with multiple personalities and a poet with an identity crisis
Editorial Design, Book Design
Special Thanks to Instructors: Ran Wei
Multiple Abstractions is a campaign to promote the typeface Priori released by Emigre. Priori is a typeface that has a serif and a sans serif set and each set has an alternate version. The designer, Jonathan Barnbrook, took inspiration from the type he would see on his walks through London. This multitude of influences and versions makes for a typeface with a multitude of personalities. That got me thinking about our own personalities. Nobody is the same all the time. Barnbrook believes in the power of design to change people’s viewpoints.
To present one of Barnbrook’s typefaces, this book had to convey a message. My decision was to talk about this very common human feeling of searching for who we are in the middle of the many personalities we have in ourselves, and to do so through the poems of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. An eccentric character himself, Pessoa wrote under a variety of names. They were not simply alter egos, they were–their creator claimed–full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. Like Pessoa, Priori is an ensemble of diverse personas. I felt there was a deep connection with the poems and the typeface.
