While typography is often associated with flat pages and screens, designers and artists have long explored how language and letterforms can become spatial, embodied, interactive, and performative experiences.
Scholar Johanna Drucker argues that visual and typographic forms are not neutral containers for information, but actively shape interpretation and perception through their material, formal, and contextual qualities. Designers and theorists such as Muriel Cooper, Katherine McCoy, and Marshall McLuhan explore how typography and media can extend beyond static surfaces to shape experiences through movement, environment, materiality, and participation.
This year, I taught a special topics course exploring typography through interaction, code, and time-based media. Throughout the semester, students investigated computational processes and rule-based systems through both physical and digital making practices. One project asked students to reconsider 2D, static typography as a spatial experience shaped through structure, light, movement, and viewer interaction. In this project, students were challenged to communicate not only through language itself, but through embodied experience, spatial perception, materiality, and physical engagement. Students translated custom typographic designs into large-scale three-dimensional structures, investigating how form, material, scale, and light transform the way letters communicate.
Initial Paper Studies & Full-scale Mockups
Work completed by Tommy Hall, 2025.
Collaboration & Installation
Working collaboratively, the class selected a shared word. Each student designed and constructed one letterform, beginning with 2D typographic compositions before translating them into dimensional structures through paper prototyping and full-scale construction. Early paper studies allowed students to experiment with extrusion, layering, negative space, structural planes, and dimensional depth before constructing final forms in foam core. Through this process, students explored how three-dimensional form alters perception, legibility, and the expressive character of typography itself.
Once assembled together, the individual letters became a collective spatial installation where typography functioned simultaneously as object, environment, interface, and experience.
Experience & Performance
Students documented the installation through experimental video interactions, using directional lighting, movement, and shifting viewpoints to transform the forms into dynamic, time-based compositions. Shadows moved across surfaces, forms revealed themselves gradually through motion, and language became something viewers physically navigated rather than passively consumed.
By combining physical fabrication, spatial design, and time-based media, the assignment encouraged students to think beyond conventional graphic design applications and consider typography as something encountered through movement, space, light, and participation.
Final Collaborative Installation, “Typographical.”
Work created by: (In order of “Typographical”) Thomas Hill (T), Virginia Ritchie (Y), Zoe Newingham (P), Jakil Day (O), Jordan Lewis (G), Joshua Walker (R), Juan Gomez-Rodriguez (A), Jamie Glasford (P), Tommy May (H), Sarah Chrismon (I), Emma Vincent (C), Katelyn Freese (A), Jorge Gonzalez (L).