Ed Fella

By Taylor McKenzie MECA ‘17 GD102 Typography

Ed Fella

Top: Prisma Color pencils.

Bottom: Pen sketch.

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Top: Ballpoint pen and pencil.

Bottom Left: Prisma Color pencil.

Bottom Right: Ballpoint pen and pencil.

Hand Drawn Type Ed Fella creates expressively raw, misshapen, hand-lettered type compositions. His typography is contorted and hand-hewn. Fella’s freeform, serendipitous approach to typographic design echoes the earlier practice by avant-garde Dadaist, Futurist, and Surrealist designers. He distorted a style of san serif copy with his

own hand writing with various thicknesses, curves, and tails to each character so that each one is different from the one before. Letters are sliced, distorted, drawn in by hand. Letter spacing is extended, line spacing is collapsed; doodles spill across grid-less layouts and type is brushed on with a similar freedom of paint.

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Top and Bottom: Commisioned flyers.

Mixing Type Left: Promotional poster.

Right: Event flyer.

“Ed makes visible the postmodern concept of deconstruction, which recognizes that behind every articulated meaning is a host of other, usually repressed meanings, some antithetical. By battering and mixing fonts, engaging in visual puns and generally violating the tenets of “good design,” Fella lets a thousand flowers bloom. His designs don’t cut through the clutter—they revel in it”. AIGA 7

Manipu lating the

All: Commisioned Flyers.

Gr id Deconstructivism began in the late eighties and has created art in a new form. Graphic designers have been following the grid for many years.

Today you still see the grid system in newspapers, brochures and books. But the deconstruction style is beginning to blow up; it can be seen in t-shirts, advertisements, and buildings. The grid was designed for graphic designers to follow a format. Ed Fella’s technique of breaking the grid makes his designs lively and unpredictable. Fella is a major influence on the deconstruction movement in art and design.

“Just looking at his work, one would think that he’s a lunatic. He forces contradiction yet still plays to the grid. Not because it’s there but because it serves his purpose to help pull the eye all over the place and still make pleasing, readable design. There is chaos and balance, existing side-byside like identical Siamese twins – one good and the other evil.”

Speider Schneider

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Top Right: Prisma Color pencil sketches.

Chaos

Bottom Left: Detroit poster.

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Edward Fella is known to break every rule in typography and design. He has a style that reads incredibly unique. Slightly based on the theory of deconstruction, Fella took that concept and pushed it even further. Fella is an extreme example of a typographer who is able to achieve the same creative freedom as painters and sculptors.

Over the years, Fella has created a body of work

that’s as compelling as it is unique. Fella disregards every rule in the book, which creates a sense of calculated chaos. Fella uses his art world clients to explore typographic ideas that have nothing to do with the artists he promotes. Conventions of legibility are overturned with wild, scattershot, compositions that turn out, on closer inspection, to be surprisingly readable.

Balance

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“Ed’s work marks a sea change in graphic design,” “He introduced ambivalence and ambiguity, the multiple meanings of design as text and subtext, and that graphic designers are really artists.”

Lorraine Wild