Week 2: Oded Ezer and the invention of a language

Typoplastic Surgeries, 2006

Being a designer in Israel, Oded has to deal with a unique situation: a language without a graphic past. Hebrew fell out of common life use in the middle ages, just when movable type spread around the globe, ending the middle age and giving birth to the printing revolution. During the following centuries, Hebrew was kept alive as a sacred language, for liturgical and historical purposes only. However, with the zionist movement of the late 19th century, Hebrew became fashionable again, a process that culminated with the post-war creation of the State of Israel.

Helvetica Live, 2004

This newly created state built itself from scratch, and so did Israeli designers regarding their language: they had to catch up with 500 years of printing tradition in the west, and take hebrew from the middle ages straight into the modern printing demands of a post-war consumer society.

That being said, it is natural that type design is on the core of Oded Ezer’s graphic language, be it commercial or personal.

His commercial work is marked by an intense production in the fields of type and editorial design. The designer has developed typefaces in the hebrew alphabet for newspapers, TV channels, books, corporations, etc. That bulk of work exhales the effort to “catch up” with the rest of the world: one can feel the utilitarian purpose and sense of urgency that come from them.

Some samples of Hebrew fonts created by Oded Ezer

Ezer’s personal work, on the other hand, is all about freedom and experiment. It reflects the same effort to “build a language” that is so obvious on the commercial work, but it tends to focus on the dark side of it: the inconsistencies, the arbitrarity of it, the menace of war… If Ezer’s commercial work mirror the optimism of zionism, his personal work is all about the fragility of the language and, ultimately, of the State of Israel.

In projects like Biotypography, Typosperma, Skype-Type, Oded transforms type into organic forms, capable of reproducing, changing, getting hurt and die.

Typoplastic Surgeries, 2006

I ❤ Milton, 2008

In his poster honoring Milton Glaser, the typography escapes the paper in nervous and long extensions, reminiscent of Giacometti statues in its confidence and fragility.

Another of his projects, called Tortured Letters, can be interpreted as an amazing metaphor for the disappearing languages in our globalized world.

 

Biotipography, 2005-2006