DERRIDA
Typographic Deconstruction
Large-format poster developed from a typographic exercise in which I subjected letterforms to increasing levels of deconstruction in order to determine the point at which their legibility reached zero. All type, deconstructed and otherwise, is set in HTF Gotham—a very well-designed but highly overused geometric sans serif typeface.
It somehow seemed appropriate that the fragmented text would use the surname of Jacques Derrida, the French cultural philosopher best known for developing the critical theory of deconstruction.
Derrida’s work was often condemned as being deliberately obfuscatory by analytical philosophers, literary critics, and, perhaps most noteworthy, linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky.
My research on the subject has led me to conclude that it is impossible to explain Derrida in words that are less confusing than Derrida’s actual work. There appears to be no word in the English language that describes this phenomenon, though I am reasonably confident that it exists in French.
This poster is probably not what Derrida had in mind when he wrote Of Grammatology.
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