Lettering and Expressiveness. When Characters Tell a Story

What links Thomas More to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti? And how does the creativity of video clips relate to Futurist posters? And yet there is a common thread called lettering, which is variously articulated in the expres- siveness of the typographic characters of the artists. Reflections, comparisons, narrations and experiments on alphabets are pro- posed, as well as the study of new characters in reference to the cultural and artistic environment in which they develop; graphic and typographic contexts are analyzed which are capable of “exploding” knowledge and imagination from the post-Renaissance utopian context to the Futurist revolution, up to the most innovative trends in the digital world. Lettering is perhaps the most appropriate area of graphics for experimenting, thinking, inventing, narrating and playing with elementary forms. Letters rep- resent an extreme synthesis of the meanings of nature and of geometry and suggest unusual alphabets, prompting us to invent new stories. There is a bi- planarity present in a letter of the alphabet: that of expression and that of content (signifier and meaning), but there is also an arbitrariness that does not connect, in any way, one to the other.