Rememory
Senior Thesis: Typographic Exploration
Growing older is something that is inevitable, and as we grow we change, but most of us have our memories to look back on. There are many people who are not so lucky however; my Abuelita (grandma) has taught me this.
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And as I experience this with her I wanted to try to understand and visualize in my own way what it might feel like to lose something as important as your memory. So, I created a typeface called Rememory that represents what I think the experience of memory loss feels like.
I presented this typeface through a type specimen that dives deeper into the feeling of losing your memory while also educating people about memory loss.
Rememory Typeface
As you can see in my typeface laid out here, each letter and number has some part or parts missing. This is how I symbolize that feeling of losing your memory; bits and pieces slowly fading away over time.
After introducing my typeface, Rememory, I break up the contents of the book into 3 parts. Within each part there are 5 different sections with the name of something that is often forgotten, a short text block about the forgotten thing, and the type treated a different way each time.
Part 1 is about things that “we”, or people with healthy memories, forget. One example from Part 1: Things We Forget,
is "To charge your phone or laptop."
Before each section starts I include a short text about the word or phrase of what is forgotten, as you can see here with "To Charge Your Phone or Laptop". The text in each section is a summary from an article about why the word or phrase may be forgotten.
Then, the topic of the section is spelled out in my typeface with some design element applied to it. In this case, the phrase gets bolder and larger with each consecutive page.
In Part 2: Things They Forget, the layout follows the same rules as Part 1 in terms of design. However, the content of this part starts to get more and more intense, with the sections' words or phrases being things that people with Alzheimer's ("They") forget. For example, the first section in Part 2 says "Feeding their pets", as this is a common preliminary thing that people with Alzheimer's forget.
In this particular section, the treatment used on the phrase is simply sizing. The phrase enlarges with each consecutive page.
By the end of Part 2 the content is meant to reflect what it might be like in the later stages of Alzheimer's. Which then transitions into Part 3: Gone.
Part 3 is meant to represent the mind of someone who is almost completely gone, lost in their illness (as sad as that reality may be). However, it is important to note that although they may be "gone" or unreachable, it doesn't mean they are no longer people. They still have thoughts, it's just that they don't really make sense, or are not possible to reach, anymore.
This is the final section of Part 3. It is a mix of several different words and numbers, all jumbled together, overlapping each other, and set in different directions. This spread is meant to express what it might feel like being in the mind of someone in the late stages of Alzheimer's.
It is important to note, as I mentioned before, that just because a person's mind and memory is unhealthy does not mean that it is completely empty.
And so I end with this last spread of my specimen (apart from the sources and colophon). I hope to drive home the point that people with Alzheimer's are still people, and Dr. Stephen Post, a professor of preventative medicine and an important researcher on Alzheimer's, puts it perfectly.
