Artist
Stefanie Posavec, Penguin UK
Abstract
I present a collection of visualizations which visually represent the rhythm and structure of Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road”.
Statement
“Writing Without Words” was a collection of text visualizations completed for my final year in the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England. The intention of this body of work was to explore various methods of visualizing literature without using words. I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexity of a story as well as create a system to highlight the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors. The structure of a novel, punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final patterns.
Any piece of literature can be visualised using my techniques, but I chose to focus my project on the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me while growing up in Denver, Colorado – a key city within the novel. The designs are color-coded according to key themes and characters in the book, all of which were painstakingly marked out in a worn copy of the novel with highlighters and markers. The colors used in the final posters were chosen from automobile paint swatches of the 1940s.
“Writing Without Words” can be found online at: http://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk
Biography
Stefanie Posavec (email) grew up in Denver and obtained a BFA in Graphic Design from Colorado State University. She completed an MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, where she now works independently on information-based art projects, and as a designer for Penguin UK.