Micro Genre: Development

Upon further research into typography and space, I came across this quote from the documentary Helvetica which I found interesting.

Mike Parker: When you talk about the design of Haas Neue Grotesk or Helvetica, what it's all about is the interrelationship of the negative shape, the figure-ground relationship, the shapes between characters and within characters, with the black, if you like, with the inked surface. And the Swiss pay more attention to the background, so that the counters and the space between characters just hold the letters. I mean you can't imagine anything moving; it is so firm. It not a letter that bent to shape; it's a letter that lives in a powerful matrix of surrounding space. It's... oh, it's brilliant when it's done well.

The quote relates perfectly to the quote from the article and Vignelli's on spacing between type. Creating my piece in Helvetica reflects this quote, and adds to the understated design due to its simplicity and iconic letter forms. The sans serif type allows the word to be read clearly and makes it look modern and more relatable. In Ryan Bassil's article he explained how Brian Eno's album Music For Airports - a pivotal album within the genre - helped him to calm him when feeling anxious. 

One quote that stood out for me was 

'ambient music is different: it can quiet your thoughts and the space in between each note allows you to experience your surroundings.'

This related to a quote well by Massimo Vignelli

 'I often say that in typography the white space is more important than the black of the type. The white space on the printed page is the correspondent of space in architecture.

The link between the music and type here due to the spacing was evident and provided me with an idea. Using the idea of the spacing in typography to represent the spacing in the music.
When looking more into the Music For Airports album I found it was 48:32 in duration, the poster measures 480 x 320 mm to reflect this. The album contains 4 tracks with varying lengths. 

To reflect the track lengths I have adjusted the spacing between each letter of the word, so the kerning between each letter is adjusted - 1630, 820, 1130, 600.

In relation to the context of anxiety and breathing Erik Spiekerman has also been quoted as saying: 

It's air, you know. It's just there. There's no choice. You have to breathe, so you have to use Helvetica. 

To begin with I chose the word calm, as the 4 letters in the word represented the 4 letters in the album Music For Airports. Adding in the full stop gave 4 spaces between characters in which I could adjust kerning to reflect the duration of each track.

Experimenting with using 4 letter words associated with being relaxed, these would be used as reminders to the viewer to help with anxiety attacks. 

Replacing the previous 4 letter words with a 4 syllable word, and breaking up the syllables in the same way as the letters looks effective but the message behind the poster is wrong - instead of having a calming effect the poster looks chaotic due to the extra letters and odd, uneven grouping of letters. The viewer will not want to be reminded of their situation, so instead a calming word should be used.

Switching the word to 'relax' rectifies this problem. The word relax has 5 letters and as a result, 4 spaces. Relax I think perfectly encapsulates the mood the anxiety sufferer needs to reach. The above experimentation echoes that 2 of the tracks in Music For Airports features loops in the tracks, this is shown here by repetition of the word over and over. However, I don't think that this gives a very relaxing appearance to the poster due to the odd spacing and many letters.

Instead of the repetition I have decided to revert back to original format of the poster and use one word as a statement. The word takes up the space on the poster in the same way that ambient music fills space. The colour has been changed from white and black to a pale blue colour, to aid with the calming appearance, and the opacity of the white text has also been dropped. This echoes the fact that ambient music should be as ignorable (due to the pale subtle colours) as it is interesting (featured in the odd, irregular spacing of the letters).