Font Poem

“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that creates flowers, not thunder.” – Rumi

As a person who loves to write, words are a huge part of who I am and how I express myself. In general, I believe words can be the most powerful tool to facilitate inspiration and movement. The words of any famous speech are what inspire change, not the voice itself. This quote means that it is more powerful to speak eloquently than to use force or volume to get one’s way.  The way a person speaks is a strong reflection of the type of person he or she is. It doesn’t matter if the worlds are spoken, written, sung or chanted. Words are valuable,and they should be chosen with care.

This assignment shows how structure and manipulation of text can convey meaning of the words. When viewing the font poem, it can be assumed that each word placement, color and text manipulation was done with an intentional purpose. The layout of my word poem is done in a manner that hopefully leads the eye through the quote and breaks up the text in a way that is fluid and creates meaning. My main purpose in the arrangement in text for this quote is to create a sort of pyramid that literally pus ‘words’ above everything. The breakup of text also is done in way that in my mind, the quote would be spoken both through tone and tempo. This is done through creating sections that pair words together. For example I separate ‘it is rain” from ‘that creates flowers’ from ‘not thunder.’ All of this is done intentionally to move the reader through the image.

Beyond layout of the words, font and manipulation of individual words help to magnify their meaning within the quotation. For the word ‘raise’ I made the letters increase in size from small to large to facilitate the meaning of the word. I chose to use Marion, a serif font because I thought it gave the word an element of sophistication. In addition to changing the size of each letter, I also made each latter a different color. My intention here was to fade from red to yellow as the font size goes from small to large. I chose these colors because I use the color yellow to represent the word ‘words’ and the color red to represent the word ‘voice.’ Lastly, I used the pillow emboss tool to give the word a 3D feeling.

I gave the word ‘words’ and inner and outer glow to make them stand out. It verifies the meaning of the quote that basically says to let your words glow. This is also why I chose to make it the Yellow. I used the font Lucida Blackletter because I felt it looked like the old newspaper font and create a visual of ‘words.’ In contrast, I tried to make the word ‘voice’ look sharp. I used the Bavel and Emboss tool with gradient and stroke. I used a dark red to create the feeling of darkness and anger and the Bank Gothic font.

For the word ‘rain’ I created two layers with the different layers so that I could move around each part of the word to create the image of falling letters like falling rain. The letters are two different shades of blue for obvious reasons of the image of water. I put a wave on the word ‘creates’ to show movement. I also used a fun curly font because I thought it looked crafty. For the word ‘flowers’ I used the font Zapfino because it looks elegant and pretty. I also put a drop shadow and outer glow around the word to draw attention to it. The word ‘thunder’ has a red color overlay and is manipulated to be fish eye. I made it have a red overlay because I wanted it to be paired with the red in the word ‘voice.’

This project was a great introduction to getting to know the basics of Photoshop in a fun and creative way. The most difficult part for me was choosing the color scheme that would create the best meaning. In the end, I hope that anyone who views my word poem will find that the meaning of the words are instilled deeper by the choices I made to manipulate they’re placement and font.