Colorface

Colorface was concepted and created by Pete McCracken and executed with Dave Ewald.

An excerpt from Restart:New Systems of Graphic Design, by Emily King
Thames and Hudson, 2001

Plazm argues that language 'is anything that communicates information'. Type is no longer merely the letters and punctuation marks that form words, sentences and paragraphs, but 'the building blocks of meaning in whatever form that meaning arises. Type can now be an image. Type can be a sound. Type can be a color.'

Adopt this view and immediately you are faced with a world that is entirely typographic, everything around you becomes part of a vocabulary. Non-alphabetic typographies range from such contained, consistent systems as road markings and internationally recognized symbols, to such sprawling, unregulated sets of information as architecture and fashion.

The idea that all communication is in some sense typographic has its roots in semiology. Significantly, semiologists suggest that anything - symbols, images, social myths - can be read. You can extrapolate from this that if it can be read, it must be a language. One step further, it emerges that if it is a language, then its expression must be typographic.

Ultimately, whether you accept the typographic-ness of what is conventionally seen as non-typographic hinges upon whether you think that language is simply one among many other methods of communication, or whether you believe that it holds some kind of privileged position. Furthering these ideas, anthropologist Grant McCracken tested the proposition that there might be a 'language of clothes' by comparing how people interpret dress with how they understand speech and written language. He reasoned that our communication through clothes was far too blunt and unsophisticated to be considered a language. Although his argument was pedantic in many ways - his trump card was to stump people by presenting them with images of clothing articles combined in unlikely ways, a device that led him to greatly underestimate the subtlety with which we do read each other's outfits - his conclusion that language is a unique means of communication is significant.

So if typography alone is typographic, where does that leave a project like Pete McCracken's colorface and its accompanying sound font? Made by randomly selecting colors (or notes) that are matched to letters, the font lends itself to colourful (or noisy) renditions of texts. Despite being called 'fonts', it is apparent that they are not typefaces, but alphabetic codes. The colours matched with the letters 's', 'i' and 'r' read 'sir' when they are put together, rather they can be decoded into the word 'sir'.

While McCracken's colorface may not be strictly typographic, it does raise pertinent questions about the nature of typographic meaning. It has long been accepted that no letterform is neutral; every typeface carries a set of meanings that has acquired in its making and through its use. By substituting color for form, McCracken highlights the imbalances between the webs of association that attach themselves to form and colour. For the most part, while our interpretation of form is subtle and historically nuanced, our understanding of colour is an unsophisticated mish-mash of popular psychology that calls up such clichés and childhood associations as warm oranges and cold blues.

In use, the colorface throws up other intriguing issues. Translating Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, McCracken arrived at an attractive grid of color. All surface, no depth, the grid is a metaphoric summary of the book's thesis. Less in earnest, as a short-hand colour font translation of the 'American Bill of Rights', McCracken proposes the colour of the children's show 'Teletubbies'. This may have been a one-liner, but there is a point: the Teletubbies' colors disguise the absence of any actual character traits. As representatives of rights, Teletubbies warn against constitutional fundamentalism, the tendency to forget that rights must belong to people, they do not stand alone.

Originally appearing in Plazm 25