Typography
Degree Zero Symposium and Digital Signage
-Arianna Denning
2021 // VCD: Typography
Degree Zero is an exhibition about the desolation after the second World War and rebuilding artistically. Artists went back to the root of drawing and began making art that concentrates on mark-making and recreating a culture that was lost following the chaos of the war. The art communicates a certain kind of emptiness and newness, as the creators try to make sense of the beauty of art after so much bloodshed.
I wanted to try to tie in the themes of Degree Zero and the mood of my museum, the MAXXI. MAXXI is an Italian museum that was a part of a worldwide architect contest, and award-winning architect Zaha Hadid won the contest to design the museum. Inside, stark white and black passages twist and turn, and melt into each other in a wonderful sinuous maze. Hadid wanted the mood of the museum to be wayfinding, where museum visitors find their own path throughout the exhibits.
I thought that there was a lot of parallel between the wayfinding of the artists in Degree Zero and the wayfinding in the architecture of the museum. Therefore, in creating my main wordmark, I wanted the words Degree and Zero to be taking their own path into the inside of the zero. I chose to have my third color be red because of it's relation to violence and the devastating violence of World War 2. I also wanted there to be a play between the spiky drawing by Hercules Barsotti and the relative openness of the space around the text. All my text is generally isolated, much like the new postwar art, except for when it's interrupted with spiky protrusions that harken back to the blades of battle.
Typography: Cantarell by Dave Crossland, Ubuntu by Dalton Maag, and Source Sans Pro by Paul D. Hunt from Google Fonts.
