“Contextualizing Place as Type: Creating an Auburn Typeface”

by Harry Lewis | Xchanges 12.2/13.1

Conclusion

As graduate-level composition courses and process movement ideals have abstracted composers from their places of composition, it’s important to resist these practices. Not only is recognizing the situatedness of a composer within their place of composition important in understanding the factors that influence their writing, it’s a way to avoid a descent into hyperreal discursive writing marked by intellectual generalization. In addition, the exercise may be introduced into undergraduate-level composition classes as an opportunity to recognize and visualize the cultural and spatial influences that may influence a growing composer’s writing studies.

A more comprehensive understanding of how letterforms are produced and function lends credence to their inclusion in elementary schools around the country for the appreciation of the next generation of backpack-clad, new-squeaky-shoe’d future intellectuals. Typography, and the recognition of letterforms and their design principles, allows the opportunity for a composer to contextualize their place within locations of composition, while also producing an artifact capable of rhetorical analysis and argumentation, and if that isn’t enough reason, it’s also pretty fun.