An assignment from my Word & Image II class to design promotional material for a (fictional) contemporary dance performance based on a poem I selected from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, with my choice of choreographers and composers to "collaborate" with. I experimented with and ultimately developed a typographic identity for the performance through a series of hierarchy and compositional exercises. Through careful analysis of the poem, my choice to juxtapose celestial and earthly bodies led me to search for ways in which type could exist on different planes.
Germs
Forms, qualities, lives, humanity, language, thoughts,
The ones known, and the ones unknown—the ones on the stars,
The stars themselves, some shaped, others unshaped,
Wonders as of those countries—the soil, trees, cities, inhabitants, whatever they may be,
Splendid suns, the moons and rings, the countless combinations and effects;
Such-like, and as good as such-like, visible here or anywhere, stand provided for in a handful of space, which I extend my arm and half enclose with my hand;
That contains the start of each and all—the virtue, the germs of all.
The ones known, and the ones unknown—the ones on the stars,
The stars themselves, some shaped, others unshaped,
Wonders as of those countries—the soil, trees, cities, inhabitants, whatever they may be,
Splendid suns, the moons and rings, the countless combinations and effects;
Such-like, and as good as such-like, visible here or anywhere, stand provided for in a handful of space, which I extend my arm and half enclose with my hand;
That contains the start of each and all—the virtue, the germs of all.
