- Hi! My name is Sage – I am a designer.
I believe in simple, powerful design with
value, that communicates and educates.
- If you would like to get in touch with me
my email address is sage@sagebrown.com
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- A typographic experiment exploring the relationship between the design of Bell Centennial and Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. 18 pages, screenprinted on found magazine advertisements and re-bound. The following essay explains the project in further detail.
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Patrick Bateman is obsessive-compulsive, a narcissist, and psychotic. He has peculiar but impeccable taste, and wears nothing but the finest clothing. He tries to eat at the best restaurants, lives in a high-rise penthouse, and is the vice-president of an investment firm. Everything about him is superficially perfect.
Ten years earlier, in 1976, AT&T commissioned Matthew Carter to design a new typeface for their telephone directories. When designing Bell Centennial, Matthew Carter took the utmost care in crafting the typeface to be legible at extremely small sizes (6 points). The most important detail of the typeface is the extremely open forms, created to combat the dot-gain that occurs when printing - AKA the ink bleeding on the page.
Bateman obsessively rambles about crocodile shoes and his Soprani sheets. He is obsessed with being in control as he slips deeper and deeper into his dementia, murdering, torturing, and abusing, leaving a trail of blood. Meanwhile, Carter is equally obsessed over the minute differences that one micrometer will affect a letterform. One too many, and the bleeding ink will render it illegible. Carter masterfully crafts the typeface to withstand the rigors and imperfections of printing. He remains in control.
This piece is a metaphor combining the obsessiveness and dementia of both Patrick Bateman and Matthew Carter. While Bateman tries to maintain the perfect image, his demented psychoses are bleeding and spilling over into his obsessively clean cut world as he loses control. Carter's beautiful craft spills across Bateman's perfect world for everyone to see.
This project originated from my interest in typefaces that were designed with a specific material and use in mind. While many typefaces are more suitable for one thing than another, only a handful are designed specifically for one intended use. Other typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia (both also by Matthew Carter), and Times New Roman, were all designed for specific uses, but still, none have quite the specific details and eccentricities of Bell Centennial. This intrigued me.
Not only was it designed for a specific use, but a specific material, and content, even. I wondered, then, what the effect of printing this typeface in a different way, on a different material would do? Is it effective? Does it still communicate as it should? I then realized that, in a sense, the typeface was designed with one idea in mind - ink bleeding on the page.
