Font poem

These are the first and final drafts of my font poem. I began by choosing a set of emotive lyrics from one of my favorite songs, Lola, by the Kinks. The lyrics include action words which I could easily bring to life through Photoshop. Also the song's relatively taboo subject matter makes it a more provocative choice to work with. The idea was to morph the text to fit the action and feelings of the song. What you should notice when reading through the poem is way the words mirror the intensity of the singer.

Fonts used: Apple Chancery, Myriad Pro, GillSans, Impact, Herculanum, Mistral

In choosing the above fonts I was trying to mimic the actions and sentiments of the word. For instance by using Apple Chancery, for both the "girls and boys" on the left side of the page I was attempting to find a flowery, elegant font. By evoking Flowers, which are stereotypically linked to women, the idea was to point out the gender confusion that the song revolves around. I did the same thing using by using GillSans for the second set of boy and girl except this time, I tried to use a masculine font. Gillsans was bold, blocky, and intense, traits stereotypically linked to men. Also notice the color shift from female colors of pinks and reds, to male blues.

I purposely inverted the word "mixed," though I left it in the default Myriad pro which was easy to read. The inversion is an illustration of mixing. The use of Impact with some brown texturing was to recreate the differing look of mud. Also Herculaneum was used to mimic the movement of shaking. The last word in the that section was "world," for which I used the cursive font Mistral, in an effort to recreate a worldly feeling( I associate cursive with a global feeling). I also textured it to look like the sky, which joins the other earthy tones of that middle section of text.

If you take a step back and look at my poem you should notice the top section is in the shape of a pair of scissors. This was done to symbolize the gender issue, the idea of going under the knife, or alterations. I used warp to curve the words into the appropriate shapes. I also used warp to mold the three "up's" into a pointed semi-arrow shape to emphasize the rising. By lining them up on top of each other I could do this, and it also created some level of symetry which I was aiming for. The final series of "la's" appear on the page out of the blackness, getting clearer and larger until the climax of the final Lola. If you are familiar with the song you know this mirrors the manner in which lyrics sung. I did this by changing the opacity level. The la's and Lola also form the shape of a horn.