Stephen Farrell

This is a designer I might be looking at for my dissertation, which is going to be about how illegible type, hand made type and diverse formats of type can fit into mainstream graphic design and text formats, such as novels, where they need to be easily read.

Stephen Farrell is a graphic designer, typographer and collaborative writer. With Steve Tomasula he released the novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland. Farrell questions the way structure of narrative effects how words are communicated and sentences are read, and in this novel he uses a completely unique page layout. He is interested in how the reader and viewer can be given a real experience with combined text and image. He experiments with the balance of flowing readability and a visually invigorating format.

Stephen Farrell - "Simply put, I write stories and explore critical ideas with design. I’m interested in taking traditional literary forms, the short story, the novel, the critical essay, and remaking these forms to include the methodologies, the vocabularies—the possibilities—of design. In the literary realm, writing and design are usually two distinct, non-overlapping activities. Most of the book pages designers labor over could be characterized as non-places. These book pages, although skillfully crafted, work tremendously hard to transport the reader to a transparent realm of language, dissolving the spatial and material aspects of the page. A lot of the work that I do pushes against this transparency and manages the flow of reading in different ways. My work still acknowledges that reading is about flow, and that one of design’s chief objectives is to manage and facilitate this flow. However, the strategies I use—the way I manipulate flow, arrange and organize texts, and employ a spatial approach to the page not unlike staging in theater —often encourage both linear and non-linear movement. Simultaneous stories may interweave, images and information graphics may interject. How this spatial, imagetext experience collides or coincides with the linearity of reading is of prime interest to me."