Breaking Rules

There are plenty of rules and norms for creating accurate visual harmony. In the most traditional sense these determining factors include size, composition, grids, margins, visual hierarchy etc.
That is why I find it most interesting when text does not follow these set rules but still achieves an intentional visual purpose that manages to communicate and highly inform the reader.

My examples come from the work of Wing Lau, part owner of "Kind-Of" gallery on Oxford and former tutor of this course!
The featured exhibit changes every two weeks with Wing covering all visual promotion of the galleries (designing the posters and flyers) with his work being mostly based around the use and manipulation of text.

The general visual feel is quite minimalist focusing on the usage of once single font, yet it is the pure composition and scale of the letterforms in which he creates an accurate feel of the gallery without heavy use of imagery, or even imagery of the artists' works for that matter.

For example this flyer was used to promote the latest exhibition "Beinargly" featuring new works of local artist Andy Uprock. Without the use of any of Uprock's original imagery Wing uses a very alienated and almost illegable composition and jumbled character base that perfectly reflects the works of the new show.

For the second poster, Wing promotes a gallery based upon artists who share a passion of bicycle culture. Instead of putting any direct visual clues of a bicycle, Wing reflects the movement created by the vehicle through varying paragraph shape and size. The text itself shares the artists' stories of travel and riding, a metaphor for the idea of movement.