Wednesday 28 January 2015

A slight refractive error - here's one I made earlier


Last year I joined Stroud Artists' Books at Stroud Valley Arts, a space for artists to meet up monthly and share their ideas for books and practice. 

Each month there is a theme and the theme for February 2014 was, Lens, and for that I used the format of a maze book.

I've just retrieved the single copy I made and looking at it now, I've decided it is a good idea to put this into production for BABE 2015: Bristol Artists Book Event at the Arnolfini 

This event is in 10 weeks on Sat 11 and Sun 12 of April (crikey)!
In my trawl around the net I discovered that the letters used in an eye test are Optotypes (test symbols).

They are not, however, letters from any ordinary typographer's font, they have their own particular, simple geometry in which the thickness of the line equals the thickness of the white spaces between the lines, and the height and the width is five times the thickness of the line . . . 
The type in the title is designed to fade away . . . just as our eye sight is prone to do with age!

3 comments:

  1. This looks interesting! Hope to see you and the book at Babe.

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  2. Thanks, I'm looking forward to it - so many interesting things there to see!

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  3. Fascinating about the rationale behind the letters on the eye-test chart. For preliterate people, they can be Es pointing in various directions, to be replicated by the hand - that's the eye test I had before starting school in the (eek) 1950s.
    Coincidentally, the March 2015 issue of World of Interiors has a decorative eye test chart in ?urdu or hindi - page 103.

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