Folding Font
In her book On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart compared speech to writing by emphasizing their relationship with time:
“Speech leaves no mark in space; like gesture, it exists in its immediate context and can reappear only in another’s voice, another’s body, even if that other is the same speaker transformed by history. But writing contaminates; writing leaves its trace, a trace beyond the life of the body. Thus, while speech gains authenticity, writing promises immortality, or at least the immortality of the material world in contrast to the mortality of the body.”
Folding Font began as a study of our interaction with the square. Inspired by Susan Stewart's quote, it progressed into a study of the act of writing as an act of marking both time and action, in this case of writing and folding.
The act of reading and writing is broken down into smaller steps: the act of writing as an act of mark-making, where each stroke is a shape of an alphabet, and the act of reading as a process of putting fragments/shapes together to form alphabets and eventually words.
The combination of writing and folding in this particular exercise results in the systematic fragmentation of letterforms. When each piece of paper is completely unfolded after being written on, the result is a code-like pattern made up of these fragments.
This 2-color piece experimented with the idea of writing 2 different words on both sides of the paper. Each word is written in a different color. The result is a more complex and colorful pattern. The use of translucent bond paper also adds layers to these patterns as the paper is folded and unfolded.
Digital, Moving/Animated Typeface
The following step is an effort in digitizing these fragments into a set of working and potentially moving alphabets. What if each folding step is a weight, a combination of weights used in a word can create interesting effect of varying levels of legibility, forcing the eye to slow down and pay more attention to the shapes, in order to read the word.
As per the nature of this project, there are still more possibilities that are yet to be explored, such as, the use of the square and folding as a system to fragment letterforms that can be applied to most existing typefaces.
Work done as part of the MFA in Graphic Design Program at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Advisor: Thomas Ockerse and Bethany Johns
© 2025 Yoana Wiman