Day 13/67 Typo Cafeteria

Image from Beaded Quotes, published by The Nelson Mandela Bay Development Agency

" Boxing is egalitarian. In the ring, rank, age, color and wealth are irrelevant. When you are circling your opponent, probing his strengths and weaknesses, you are not thinking about his colour or social status."
Long Walk to Freedom, 1994

So, while sweating on the bicycle and dashing off an email that was long overdue, I realise that tomorrow(today) is the final day for submissions to submit projects to the World Design Capital 2014 curators, in order to get "project approval" and be able to hook in and become part of the official events.

My idea is still something of an adolescent- it is hanging out all alone, with no friends and doesn't have any money. 

I've been wanting to combine student creative exploration of first principles of typography (type weight, counters, leading, kerning, spacing, baseline, baseline shift, x-height variance, legibility etc) with the work of South African and African poets. I love the poetry I saw in the London Underground- that even in that public space where people are mundanely going to work, there is beauty and soul food, which each person can internally enjoy. 

So my proposal is to design and place poetry around our university campus and its edges, with playful typographic exploration, with some intended dialogue between site, poem and users of that location.  It would be temporary, and apart from celebrating the work of African poets, might just make our diverse student group more aware of our collective poetic heritage.

Comments, please?

Run 20, Cycle 20, Step 20. Sweat.