Creacionismo

クレアシオニスモ / 1916–1930s / Layout / Experimental Typography

A movement begun in Chile and carried through Paris, which declared that poetry does not copy nature but creates new facts. It produced visual poems in quantity, arranging letters as shapes and making the border between language and page a subject of experiment. With Ultraismo, one of the two pillars of the Spanish-language avant-garde.

Creacionismo — Vicente Huidobro, calligram Triángulo armónico from Canciones en la noche, 1913 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Hoder Slanger
Vicente Huidobro, calligram Triángulo armónico from Canciones en la noche, 1913 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 · CC BY-SA 2.0 · © Hoder Slanger

At a glance

Visual cues

  • Letters arranged as shapes
  • Lines of verse recomposed visually
  • Type without ornament
  • The white ground used as a component

Best used for

  • Posters and titles where the words physically form the image, with no illustration and no photograph
  • Book and exhibition typography for texts that must be read as constructed objects rather than transcribed speech

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Dictionary entry

Type
One plain face at several sizes, with the change of scale as the only expressive device.
Composition
Words positioned as objects in a field, the white ground measured as carefully as the type, alignment abandoned wherever the sense requires it.
Material
Black on white and nothing else: no rule, no colour, no image to fall back on.
Caution
Scattering words for the look of it: here the position of every word is an assertion, and arbitrary placement leaves only a shape.
Further study
Vicente Huidobro's theory / Comparison with the calligramme / The typesetting of Altazor

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Link
https://indexstyle.org/styles/creacionismo
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[Creacionismo — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/creacionismo)
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