In my senior thesis exhibition project, my main goals was to explore what a literary passage could become if hand lettering were applied to it.
When I was younger, I struggled with how boring it was for me to read books. I chose to tackle this childhood struggle by exploring options through this project. Starting with the question: "What if a piece of literature not only sought to maintain the attention of its readers through a compelling narrative, but also enthralled their readers with compelling lettering that reflected the tone of the story?" By using similar techniques that are, generally, employed in posters, not books, why couldn't the words on the page, not only progress the narrative, but visually bind the reader into the text?
I curated quotes from literature having to do with madness. The range of tones in each passage approximates how I had felt as a kid being told that I had to read visually boring pieces of paper.
"Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up & went mad now?"
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams– this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness– and maddest of all: to see life as it is and not as it should be!"
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad."
George Orwell, 1984
"This place has only three exits, sir:
Madness, & Death."
Rene Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking
"'And how do you know that you're mad?' 'To begin with,' said the Cat, 'a dog's not mad. You grant that?' 'I suppose so,' said Alice. 'Well then,' the Cat went on, 'you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'"
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
"If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil."
Anthony Burgees, A Clockwork Orange
