The advent of the poster, par excellence a medium of typographic spectacle, must have been a miraculous revolution transforming the nineteenth century public spaces into visually seductive marvels. Inspired by the emerging mass culture, artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and John Heartfield, pioneered in turning the applied arts into political persuasive instruments. Or look over here, just down there into the hallway and glimpse at the film posters of Hendrik Tomaszweski which must have seemed to come from another world during the post-war years. Such poetic approaches to unravelling a narrative in the single frame of the poster can be seen as the beginning of reflective attitudes in typographic masonry, or dare I say, in graphic design. Such examples, and I encourage you to have a look around, perfectly illustrate the subjective interpretive capacity of visual languages, and thus, of typographic masonry.
