Hasta La Ideas

US and Norway-based studio Non-Format has produced a striking poster for Tokyo Type Directors Club’s annual showcase featuring intricate 3D lettering and a Japanese-inspired custom typeface.

The annual exhibition is on display at the Ginza Graphic Gallery in Tokyo, and showcases the winning work from this year’s TTDC awards. Non-Format was asked to design a poster promoting the event and created a series of highly detailed ‘sculptural’ letters using Cinema 4D software.

“It was an honour, not to mention a daunting prospect, to be invited to create the poster for the 2014 exhibitions. The brief was pretty open and we knew that the audience for these events are extremely visually literate and open-minded, so we felt we had an obligation to push ourselves and to test out some new ideas and techniques,” say studio founders Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn.

“We’ve recently been exploring new areas of digital imagery, in particular, the vast arena of 3D, so we took this project as an opportunity to try out some new ideas…and just wander off into the unknown for a while,” they add.

Letters are designed to create a strong impact from a distance and reward viewers with intricate details on closer inspection, say Forss and Eckhorn. “There’s a lot of detail in the surface texture itself but we added quite a lot of extra photographic elements to create as rich a visual experience as we could.”

The work appears on B1 and B2 posters as well as A4 flyers, alongside a bespoke typeface with step motif and e’s bearing an extra horizontal stroke.

Forss and Ekhorn first designed a family of typefaces with an extra stroke when working on their monograph, Love Song, back in 2006, and say that as the idea came from looking at the structure of modern sans serif Japanese characters, it felt “only right and proper” to adopt the same style for their TDC posters.

The step motif is inspired by the work of Wolfgang Weingart and was previously used by the studio in a custom typeface for Sølve Sundsbø’s Rosie & 21 Men exhibition at Oslo’s Shoot Gallery:

“This uses a softer wavy line instead of the harder-edged zigzag that we incorporated into the typeface for the TDC project, but they are certainly typographic siblings,” they explain.

“We included the zigzag [in the TDC font] partly as our nod to postmodernist revivalism and partly because we think it adds quite an interesting texture to the poster as a whole.”

Non-Format has also designed an intriguing animated teaser for photographer Stephen Gill’s Shoot Gallery exhibition, Talking to Ants:

The film begins with a jumble of tumbling lines, shapes and dots, which are gradually rearranged to spell out Gill’s name and the show’s title. Visuals are set to a soundtrack from Bristol composer Zoon van snooK which features a recording of children playing.

It’s an interesting take on an exhibition preview and an inventive way of presenting key themes in an artist’s work without showing much of the work itself.

“We…produced a teaser video for each of Shoot’s three exhibitions [at Shoot Gallery],” explain Forss and Eckhorn. “These videos usually focus on showcasing the photography work itself but, as we were given only one image to work with, we shifted the emphasis towards a solely typographic approach…Our intention was to echo some of the randomness and accidental compositional chaos of Gill’s photographic work,” they add.