Time & Perspective
Experimental typography on the construction and destruction of time.
A post-graduate typography assignment at Srishti, made under the theme Time: Construction and Destruction.
I treated letterforms as material instead of a system to apply. I built them up, pulled them apart, and looked at what was still readable once I had.
Good times and bad times are not properties of the clock. They are a reading, and the reading belongs to whoever is doing it. The same hour is short to one person and long to another, and the same year gets told as a loss or as a beginning depending on who is asked and when. Time is what happens; the good and the bad are what we lay over it.
Taking a clock apart makes the same point. Pulling the face into pieces is not only destruction: the pieces fall into a new arrangement, and something else becomes legible in it that the intact dial could not say. Every deconstruction is a construction of something. That is why the two words in the brief are one movement rather than two, and why the letters here are broken rather than drawn.
The project
The design element: ! 3 X p #
Everything in the series is built from five characters and nothing else: an exclamation mark, a three, a capital X, a lowercase p and a hash. They were chosen for their strokes rather than their meanings, because between them they hold every move a clock face needs. A vertical with a dot under it. A pair of stacked bowls. Two crossing diagonals. A stem with a bowl hung off it. A grid of four lines. Rotated, repeated and set on a radius, those five shapes make the marks around every dial, the hands, and the hours. Nothing is drawn from scratch. That constraint is the argument rather than a rule I set myself to be difficult: if a whole clock can be assembled out of five borrowed glyphs, then the face was never the thing. The arrangement was.
Credits
- Concept and design Rabi [Rabiul Islam]