The beauty of typographic portraits

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

What is typography?

Typography is the art of placing and arranging text according to the ambience or requirement. Use of typefaces is no longer restricted to just articles or media of similar kind. Typefaces are more like music notes. Each note strikes a tone to create a song. Typography in itself is a vast subject. There are many branches to typography. One such branch is portrait making (or otherwise known as text art). Previously, ASCII art was the previous form of typography art we see today.

When Leonardo da Vinci painted, he put his paint brush to his canvas and magic happened. Five hundred years later, nothing has changed. We are still using paint brushes and a canvas but this time its virtual and the magic happens on computers and graphic editing software like Photoshop or Illustrator.

A few examples

There are various ways and techniques to create a typographic portrait. A typographic portrait is not limited to just portraits of people. It can also be a social ad, credits of a movie, can be creatively used in music videos, and much more. In this article, I have tried and compiled some incredibly beautiful imaginations of artists along with some of my own work.