When I took my walk through San Marcos I wasn’t quite sure what kind of vernacular type I wanted to document, but as I walked I started to notice a pattern in what I gravitated towards. I really liked restaurant signs, letters that curved, and graffiti that heavily distorted the text in an interesting way because it had a kind of dancing effect that I liked.
I also found it very interesting how in some alleys I could see text that had clearly had a purpose as signage at one point, but had fallen into disrepair. On the side of one restaurant there were two letter “S” that seemed to be a couple decades old, the other letters had long since fallen off or been removed. I found it interesting and a little peculiar that these two letters were all that remained, evidently human hands had not been thorough in their erasure of the previous words. No one seemed to care enough to remove them.
I was originally going to use typography from a walk in another location, but I liked the designs that I came up with while collaging my San Marcos text, so I decided to go with the designs I had created in class instead of using my images from France.
My idea for the final two posters were twofold: I wanted one poster to include circular elements, a nice cohesive, centered composition inspired by the restaurant signs I had seen as I walked.
I encountered quite a bit of difficulty, however, in getting my text to form a convincing circle. Eventually I found a tool on Illustrator called “polar grid tool” which projected a circle for me to use as a reference in getting my text round.
For the second poster I wanted something that was peaceful, yet energetic. For this piece I relied more heavily on graffiti and herbalist flyers that I saw as I walked. I intentionally misspelled the word “early,” the largest piece of text in my poster, in order to not let it distract from the composition. The word forms a diagonal composition cutting the poster into two sections, one filled with dancing, falling, whimsical looking words. I decided, while making my final digital design, to move or remove all letters and text above the diagonal stream to leave this side contrastingly bare and draw the eye to the text beneath it, giving the piece a sense of a falling, downward motion.
Once I got to the stage of choosing colors I already had a certain feel in mind, so I picked some light, slightly cool, pastel like shades. And then, after having to reprint multiple times because people kept printing on my paper, I finally mounted my posters.
-Alana Radkevich
April 4th 2023