Out of the complete palette of the graphic designer, one of the most effective methods to reinforce a message or idea is the possibility to direct the combination of type and image: the reason why the 'Passage of Entanglement' investigates the dialogue between letters and pictures.
Graphic designers are both blessed and cursed for working with two very distinct modes of communication: the word and the image. When the two coexist, each remains a distinguisable entity, occupying its own space, while continously interacting with the other in dictinct ways.
As one of the few, Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell attempted to unravel the magic between pictures and letters in their book ‘Type, Image Message’ (Rockport Publishers, 2006). Though many combinations of permuations of are possible, they separated the following four criteria: separation, fusion, fragmentation and inversion.
In this passage in The Palace of Typographic Masonry, these categories are each represented by five examples, and they form the source collection of this space. You can find works by Piet Zwart, Ralph Schraivogel, Maureen Mooren and so on, in the hope that they can inspire other graphic designers to use this magic as well. And to go beyond what design critic Rick Poynor once described as a ‘fully postmodern representional space, where all that is solid often melts into an intoxicating, semi-abstract blur’.
The 'Passage of Entanglement' celebrates the craftmanship of amalgamation of type and image and shows how each can pull the other in specific directions. Letters become bolts, serpentines turn into numbers, text is constructed as buildings and a portrait acts as a stage for a variety of messages. Here visual communcation takes a poetic shortcut.
