Expressive Words

The Expressive Words project forced me to be creative in a sense I had never considered previously. Using only the letters of the words and a limited selection of fonts, we had to describe the words’ meaning. First it had to be understood what the word meant, how the word sounded, and how the word is generally used. For example, a word like “silly” seems to be best fit typed out in a san serif like helvetica, because sans serif is less formal, unlike “strict” which is a very serious word and would be more suited to a font with serifs. The individual letters to each word also began to hold more significance, like the m-a-n in “romantic,” because sometimes the man is expected to bring the romance. Personally, I perceive “elegance” as something subtler, so naturally it only seemed to make sense to have elegance spelled out in lowercase and in a lighter shade of gray as opposed to “in your face” black. The most important thing I learned from this project is that there are a lot more ways to define a word than just picking its definition out of a dictionary.