Anna Garforth

I've always been a fan of taking my design or my typography & making them into tactile, real life objects.  Anna Garforth is taking her typography & doing just that.  She is creating these beautiful type faces and putting them into a real world context.  In the above photograph, she's made cookies out of typography and laid it out into a poster form.

Anna is an East London based designer working for a company called The Plant which offers a range of services from brand identity, to signage & shopfronts, to digital design & development.  While The Plant offers your normal services such as logo and brand design, Anna takes her art to a completely other level.  She's bringing art into your face & into your space for all to see.

I feel like making art tactile, something that you can touch or feel (or even smell, like the cookie poster) can make it relatable on another level.  Some people look at galleries and art shows & feel a distance from the piece because it's either behind glass or rope.  Taking art out into nature & into a public space breaks that boundary between art and people.  It's bringing people into our weird little world & showing them around.

Anna has done many of these types of typographic installations, one of which was made entirely out of moss.

She also uses public space to help create her work, such as Play More (below).  She took an already existing fence & transformed it into a typographic art piece.  Not only is it very nice to look at, it has a message & is super impactful.

I feel like a big misconception in the graphic design world is that we're stuck in this niche of having to only create logos or brands or packaging or movie posters, when in fact we can use our talent to make an impact, to empower and to change.  We aren't a stagnant art, we can move out from behind our Mac's and do something important.  And that's what I feel like Anna Garforth is doing with her art.

One more thing (this isn't all about social change or anything, it's just super awesome), Anna created this logo below & it just was too cool not to share.  Here's what her website says about it, "A logo was created using bioluminescent bacteria. It was photographed in the dark when it was at its brightest luminescence. The bacteria was inoculated in a petri dish beforehand and then painted through a stencil to create the logo. All artwork was createdand photographed in a laboratory."

HOW FREAKING COOL IS THAT?? [/rant].