ALRIGHT
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The First Word
In a sense, the first two words of this work are a tack-on. In a challenge to work with ten words put through ten separate processes over and over, I knew I wanted to use the phrase ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ That phrase is only eight words long. So, I decided to append it by making it an answer to the challenge. My goal is to take ten words and put them through as many varying processes as possible, transforming them through process
to process? Alright then, in for a penny, in for a pound! If I’m going to do it at all, I might as well go all the way. This is where the sum total of my phrase basis was born, and so the eight words became ten.
The seed of the idea for ‘Alright’ was a simple one, if not a relatively empty one at first. Hard pressed to find a way to actually begin the phrase after experimenting with many in the middle, the thought popped in to represent ‘all’ the ‘alright’s in a composition of repeated pattern. I rendered the word once, tracked and kerned it in place to prepare itself for a tight repeating pattern, a condensed typeface to harmonize with the repetition. Initially, the repeat traveled along a diagonal, so that ‘all’ the ‘alrights’ all traveled ‘right.’ This pull apart of the concept seemed all together too silly to make it to the end however, and so as it progressed the negative space offset corners gave way to an all over compositional result.
were to wrap it around letters from the word in 3D, but the further pile on of alrights didn’t seem at all right, so I moved to a mask I had sitting around. There had been a persistent crack in it and I had thought for a while that taping it over would fix it, which moved to pasting it over, which moved to pasting on strips of the text turned textile.
The pattern presented a good template for use as a textile, to cover a surface. My first thoughts
It became clear to me as I worked on this project that knowledge of this phrase was thinner than I expected. Perhaps due to my American origin
Meticulously brushing on Mod Podge to smooth down the paper, coating and re-coating around the contours of the mouth and nose to smooth the texture as close to the curves as could be, My thought process was that a textual warp similar to a digitally created scape could be tricked into being with the analog approach, the silhouette of the face emerging from the pattern of the repeated type through its bend to form in physical media. During a week when our professor was
rendering me more foreign in a Canadian context—wouldn’t be the first time—or perhaps due to my elder state, my parents in their 60s-70s, I’ve always felt a bit like I was raised in the 1950s. Regardless, I say, ‘Alright!’ no time but at the first to lay things out. The phrase ‘In for a penny, in for a pound’ essentially means if you’re going to get involved or do
away and the originator of the In-Out-In process consulted us on our work, he showed slides of a manifestation of his ideas for the project, a printed, destroyed, photo-composed, and repeated phrase. He said the student had rendered the final work in inverse to bring out the contrast of the text as white against black, and that got the wheels spinning in the right direction. In my always messy office workspace (and the mess, it is important to mention, is in my view as important to display to the design process as any manicured finished work), I found the whitest surface I could and set up my portrait session. With an off camera flash triggered to brighten the space with as much light to assist the eventual inversion process as possible, I dialed in the best shooting angle, exposure, ISO, and facial angle.
something partly, you might as well go all the way with it (pound being the currency, of Brittish origin.) If you’ve gotten involved, you’re going to see it through till the end, regardless of the effort involved. The phrase stuck in my head when trying to think of words to work with. It reflects how I tend to approach my work; Once I commit to something, I find it hard not to go all in, bring it to a full state, or past it. And so, converting it with
two more words into the declarative, it became the challenge and framing of the whole endevor. If I’m going to explore transmutations of type through multiple processes, I might as well go all the way, regardless of requirement.
After close to 40 shots, I had the one I needed. Taking the photos in for the edit, I masked out all but the mask, raised the contrast and exposure, limited the grayscale values of the image curve, and cloned out the elastic strap to present the mask as a pure abstraction of the text. Bringing in the text from the initial pattern, I sized it and composed the two to present the sense of a continuation from repeated text into warped form. My aim wasn’t to merge so fully that the text appeared actually to break from the line and travel over the contours of the face, though that could be a good method as well. Instead, I wanted to maintain some sense of the raw nature of the mask. Over its surface with the cut strips of text, the full word rarely comes together in entirety. Instead, the repeated presence of each individual element of the word, the relationships between
letters, or upper and lower cases, broadcast the sense the the whole word even when not shown truly. This was something I felt was gained in the analog process, so I wanted to give enough breathing room for it to maintain that value. It was suggested that I try inverting one layer over the next for contrast sake, so I did. I tried each iteration to see which seemed most suited, and as they came together, I imagined what they might look like merged. So then, I composed them all together, forming a sort of crest of faces. Along the central axes, letter forms merge with their opposites to create new glyphs, merging the reverse with its inverse, making all alright.