"Arts & Letters" is an essay I wrote for Colophon Foundry's "FIVE YEARS," a catalogue accompanying an exhibition by the same name.

Inspired by forms exploring perspectivism, most prominently Wallace Steven's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," I formulated twenty-six ways of thinking about typography, the role of the type designer, and the wide range of possible applications a typeface may take, once released and set into the marketplace for public consumption and usage.

The piece encourages close reading, and seeks to demystify and situate typography within a broader field of thinking and practice in the liberal arts.

Colophon, an independent type foundry based in London and New York, asked me to contribute a piece of writing for a catalogue celebrating their fifth anniversary. The publication accompanies an installation at KK Gallery, titled "FIVE YEARS," and features twenty-six typefaces designed by the foundry to date, including one specially-drawn for the occasion.

Highlighting the role of the type designer in the creative process – as a tool maker, form-giver, and implicit, disembodied author in its future uses – each typeface is portrayed in an imagined moment in their applied lives, through a series of speculative renderings and ordinary objects.

As a writer and non-designer who nonetheless works at a graphic design studio and is aware of its existing discourse, I wanted to use my position as an "insider-outsider" to think more broadly about the topic, and create a piece of writing that could demystify type design, and provoke both specialized and non-specialized audiences to consider typography in a more expansive way.

Though perhaps puzzling at first, each of the twenty-six grafs interrelate with various ideas and themes. Referencing subjects and ideas not typically within the purview of graphic design, the piece invites others to jump into the discussion.

My writing process began with an initial discussion with Colophon, who at the time were at the early stages of producing the images and works featured in the exhibition, but nonetheless had a firm sense of the ideas they wanted the project to explore — the tenuous and strange role of the type designer; the process of designing type; and the idea of typography as an integral tool used within the broader fields of literature, visual arts, and communication as a whole.

Working as a journalist and a researcher to tease out, question, and articulate these ideas, I began to conduct independent research into various tie-ins and precedents, using my background in literature and writing to help offer an outside perspective to this specialized field of design.

Based on these findings, I sent a set of questions to Colophon as a way to prompt further discussion, which we then continued via email over the course of several weeks.

It soon became clear to us that a conventional essay format, typically carrying an overarching argument or point of view, would necessarily limit the rich set of discussions we had. Since the act of type design also struck me as completely post-modern and abstract, a twenty-six part prose piece – matching both the number of letters in the English alphabet, as well as the number of typefaces designed by Colophon to date – seemed most fitting. The form of the piece runs parallel to the ideas of perspectivism we wanted to evoke.

As a graduate of the SVA's MFA Design Criticism program, the challenge of reaching different audiences and offering different perspectives is always something I am trying to address in my work. Design is all around us — it is simply, and vastly, the world we have collectively created for ourselves, from books to buildings and cities and systems. When I write, I try to keep design out of its silo, demystified and interconnected into everyday life.

Within the field of graphic design writing, in particular, recent discussion has tended to revolve around the supposed lack of critical voices within the genre. There has been plenty of speculation as to why this could be, but the discussion has remained smugly meta. Rather than addressing the issue by actively producing more critical writing about graphic design, writers and thinkers qualified for the task distract themselves through cool remove, intellectualizing the lack, and pointing fingers at the profession in the process.

My feeling is that if design doesn't belong in a silo, neither should design writing.

This piece tries to explode the genre a bit, through a mix of cross-disciplinary references in the arts and letters; my own personal experiences as an outsider who has one foot in; and some ideas straight from the designer's mouth. My hope is that, through this mix of ideas and perspective, this piece is something that my lawyer sister, musician boyfriend, filmmaker friend, and graphic designer boss could all relate to, either in part or sum.