Ultraísmo
ウルトライスモ / 1918–1925 / Layout / Experimental Typography
A Spanish-language avant-garde that called for poetry compressed into metaphor and stripped of ornament. On the magazine page its type ran diagonally, woodcut abstractions were let in among the lines, and the poem was set as a plate in its own right. The earliest experimental typography to travel back and forth between Iberia and South America.
Diagonal type and open space / Woodcut abstractions as illustration / Short lines with the metaphor compressed / The magazine as the form of publication
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Small-press literary and cultural magazines where setting the text as an image is the whole editorial position · Type-led posters and covers that need energy without recourse to illustration or photography
- Type
- Wood and metal display type mixed on one page, with lines set at competing angles.
- Composition
- The page composed as a plate: the poem's own lines form the structure, white space is an element, and no column grid survives.
- Material
- Letterpress on cheap magazine stock, with a woodcut block dropped straight into the text area.
- Caution
- Angling type as a flourish over a conventional column: the angle came from setting language as an image, and without that reason it is styling only.
- Further study
- The pages of the magazines Ultra and Grecia / Borges's early activity / Its divergence from Creacionismo