Textura: The Woven Word — Aoife Mooney
Channel: TypeCon
Date: 2020-08-20

Recorded during TypeCon2018: Xx in Portland, Oregon

The word ‘textura’ is derived from the Latin verb ‘texere’, meaning ‘to weave’. The texture of a paragraph is carefully built by a considerate typeface designer by the elements and relationships of the positive forms and negative counterforms and spaces, both horizontally and vertically, which sit in a delicate and intricate system of interdependent parts, repeating and reconfiguring to express a texture: a typographic color. The weaving process creates a fabric of a woven ‘ground’ in a manner that resembles this structure. The warp sits as a vertical grid, through which the weft travels back and forth from side to side between layers of the warp. This paper presents the results of a semester spent learning to weave while considering the functional and semantic value of texture in a reading experience. I will show examples of a typeface I developed as a response to this experience and how I translated elements of this typeface into a piece of woven communication. In particular, I will engage with the work and writings of Anni Albers, with respect to the creation of symbolic pattern languages through weaving, and relate these to the symbolic pattern language of typography. I will reflect on the contrasts and affordances of each drawing process as necessitated by the medium, positing the practice of typeface design as a form of speculative design and reflecting on weaving as embodied experience.