This project was an exploration of my anxiety and as such was deeply personal. Be it that I’m a type designer, I found it fitting to express my anxiety in my own typeface. To properly convey both anxiety and its counter, I developed two contrasting typefaces. One that was flexible, unbound, natural, and had low legibility, and the other as a rigid, sharp, and static counter. 

OCAD U Final Work:
Anxiety Informed Typography
Type Design & Exploation
Toronto Ontario, 2022

“Anxiety Informed Typography is an exploration of perspective and influence through the medium of contrasting letterforms. This project attempts to explore and convey the helplessness, cognitive dissonance, stress, confusion, frustrations, and other wide array of emotions stemming from my own anxiety. The topic is contextualized through my exploration of what I see as my place in the world and conveyed through my fascination with typography.”

The concept behind the series of books and posters that made up the final body of work in this project was reducing each element of the topic to its core and then bringing them together again. The first three of the four books are just that, each book is a dissection of the title concept. All three concepts culminate in the fourth book, which is physically scaled to be the same size as the first three combined. 

The fourth book is the wall posters displayed in smaller scale and is meant to be viewed last after digesting the wall posters, and reading through the three previous concept books. While the posters, being the first thing to draw the viewer's eye, are overwhelming and hard to focus on, the smaller scaled copies of the fourth book are seen after the viewer has taken in the rest of the display. Revisiting these posters in the smaller scale after taking in the message and perspectives of the books, ideally renders the same overwhelming and anxiety-inducing work less abrasive and more manageable to the audience.