Lies are so ingrained into our daily lives that we no longer recognize them. The lies told by politicians become falsehoods. The claims made in ads become exaggerations. The con becomes an honest, and therefore forgivable, mistake.
I wanted to explore that normalization by trying to remember the first time I was lied to or someone betrayed my trust. This is a spread from that project, where I first wrote down my memory of that event (handwritten on the left page) and then called my older sister to hear her memories (text on the right side).
Poster made for the Visiting Designers’ Lecture Series. Co-designed with Aren Williams.
I wanted to make a typeface that had to be interpreted, with pieces that alone would be unintelligible but together would hint at a hidden form, the way a conspiracy theorist connects moments together to tell a larger story. I settled on a layered typeface where one font would be the negative space between the glyphs and the other would be the counters. To hint at the censored lines in confidential government documents, the lower case glyphs are capped off at the base and x-height and the upper case are capped at the base and cap height so that each line of type forms a bar.
This image is a spread from the type specimen for MK Ultra.
