Data Type: Letterpress Printing & Info Design

I combine letterpress printing with information design. I am seeking to demonstrate that information design can function to both visually communicate quantitative figures and alter how the audience views sets of numbers. Through letterforms and typesetting, I create opportunities for viewers to spend time exploring information. I am interested in blurring the lines between art, design, and information to create images imbued with layered meaning.

Letterpress printing is a process in which raised surfaces are inked and pressed into paper. Wood and metal type are arranged—or typeset—by hand. The type is locked into place on the press, the letterforms are inked, the press is run, and voilà! Here, I am hand-inking some wood type in our letterpress shop at ECU.

Over the course of a year, I compiled a Spotify playlist made up of songs that my friends shared on their Instagram stories. I’ve long felt that my lack of musical competency is the greatest ignominy of my existence—so I started this playlist in an attempt to educate myself. Once the list had grown to 525 songs, I stopped adding and started analyzing. I worked through finding an algorithm to assist in data analysis, and then executing further data analysis in Microsoft Excel. The algorithm helped to categorize the songs by genre, decade, and duration.

Each song’s genre is shown by a specific letterform. I selected each form because I felt it represented its genre in some way. All 525 songs in the playlist are individually represented in this visualization. As songs get longer, the point size of the type goes up. Longer songs are shown by bigger letterforms.

Friendly Songs Visualization

I didn’t like my first attempt at this songs visualization. My typesetting had some weird negative spaces, so I printed over 100 copies just to make sure I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome. Indeed, I am not satisfied. So, I decided to redo my typesetting and chose new colors for the split-fountain background. My original design used colors to indicate the decade in which the song was recorded—I abandoned the decade variable for the new version. On the second round, I focused on evenly distributing the negative space and visual weight.

Blues - eyeglass lowercase g

Classical - uppercase S

Country - lowercase sans serif l

Dance - italic lowercase k

Easy listening - italic lowercase w

Folk - ampersand

Hip hop - sans serif $

Jazz - italic z

Friendly Songs: Key

Latin - italic i

Metal - upper or lowercase X

New age - lowercase v

Pop - very round 8

R&B - lowercase m

Reggae - lowercase p

Rock - uppercase O

World - uppercase Q

(I’m back to making playlist updates regularly)


This project’s data set shows information about all the books in my apartment on 10/9/22. A total of 232 books are in the data snapshot. The first step for this project was to select characters to represent the information. For these data, I chose characters I could easily annotate, O’s and 0’s. I knew I’d be able to fill the counters with color for one data variable, and draw symbols above and below each character to indicate additional variables. On the press bed, we see our 232 books as individual pieces of type. My choice in which O or 0 goes with which book was arbitrary, they serve as containers for the annotated information to come.

bibliophile

After setting up the structure of this design around the first data variable of 232 books, I moved into data analysis. I enjoy doing this by hand. Not only are these my books, I selected which data points to include, the date of data collection, how I analyzed it, and how I’m presenting it. There is a person making these choices about EVERY data set. The way I am depicting the data makes this clear, and keeps the human role from getting lost. After data analysis, I annotated each oh or zero with the corresponding data points for each book.

Since completing this piece, I’ve added over 30 books to my collection—and finally got another much-needed bookshelf! I’ve put myself under a second book-buying moratorium, but those seem to be short-lived around here. Interestingly, I don’t own a copy of my favorite book, Jurassic Park. I bet my sister has the family copy.