Verbicovisual Explorations

Published January 23, 2025

Concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard coined the term “verbicovisual” in the ﬁrst article published on concrete poetry in Britain (in Typographica 7, 1963). It seemed like an appropriate title for this book.

This project, created for the ISTD ‘Sound Bites’ brief, typographically explored a collection of sound clips recorded across Britain between 1950 and 1965. The unique focus was on capturing dialectal words and phrases rarely seen in print, emphasizing their oral origins.

The research led to inspiration from 1950s England’s artistic movement of concrete poetry, where typographic arrangement visually conveys meaning usually expressed through speech. Sofia Pro was integral to the design, offering clarity and versatility to represent the interplay between spoken language and visual typography. The project earned the designer honorary membership in the ISTD.

Different weights of Sofia Pro were used in some poems for emphasis.

The orange pages indicated different speakers and sections, and from the transcriptions the designer made a series of concrete poems whose forms were determined by the voice of the speaker.

Besides functioning as dividing pages, the orange sheets added to the aesthetic quality of the book, creating unexpected typographic forms.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

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