To physically showcase the font I had designed I needed to create a type specimen of some kind. I looked into a range of different type specimens as well as campaigns promoting gender equality.
Idea 1
Period Equality designed by Paula Scher is a new organisation hoping to eliminate ‘tampon tax’ in the US. Scher renamed the non-profit from Menstrual Equality to Period Equity, creating a sans-serif black logotype using Margaret Calvert’s New Rail Alphabet typeface. She has spotted it with red dots to “pull no punches” about the “uncomfortable” subject of women’s periods, she says.
Idea 2
A more straightforward and traditional version of a type specimen booklet would be to create a something in the style of the ones shown below, with a range of different pangrams and showcasing the alphabet.
Idea 3
Another idea was to create a less traditional Zine to be the type specimen. This could then be used to outline issues of gender equality in the industry to display the letterforms, in a more gritty and honest format similar to how the Geurilla girls highlight inequality in the art world.
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, "[M]ainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work."
A range of inspiring Zines include:
In many of the zines I found they had a limited colour scheme, which reduces production costs, therefore if I were to make one I would also try to limit the colour palette to one or two colours.
For the content of the zine, I compiled a list of copywriting and facts that could be featured on the different pages:
- 'It's not a confidence issue'
- Outline statistics to do with women at events - underrepresentation
- 'Why did I get the woman' syndrome - Paula Scher
- Outline issues such as lack of support raising a family
- List of describing words for men and women. eg. Women called 'Bossy', men called 'assertive'.
- 'I just want to run with the boys and act like them too, but when I act exactly like them...I get called difficult.'
- Statistics on the number of women CEOs
- Quotes about typography being 'invisible'.
- Stats about 88% of female creatives saying that they lack role models.
- Quote about people using feminine as an adjective to describe curly, cute, delicate fonts. Something like 'Do I look like a feminine font to you?'
Idea 4
Create a flip book of most notable women in typography history to showcase their work and pay homage to their contributions to design. In the essay 'Type persons who happen to be female' by Susanne Dechant, she states that 'the achievements of pioneering female typographers in history are in urgent need of consideration. They make excellent interview subjects, who not only look back on impressive careers but can also see them in overview - including all the zigzagging twists and turns in their personal biographies, welcoming the unwelcome divergences, which they can now explain and assess in compelling terms.'
Chosen Idea
Design a Guerilla Girls style zine showcasing the ugly truth of gender disparity within the type industry highlighting figures and facts about the statistics of women in design conferences to showcase the font. Make the zine cheap and easy to reproduce so it can be distributed around hunderds of studios and agencies in the industry to increase pressure on employers and eliminate gender disparity.
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