38 STUDIO/LAB
“What I’ve come to appreciate about this project, and others like it, is that these conference transcripts are in-between texts,” says Jack Fisher, designer at Studio/lab. To produce a transcription of the 2006 American Institute of Architects conference, as well as an inset poster announcing an associated Cranbrook summer institute, Fisher experimented with textual and typographic solutions. The resulting publication presents the conference texts much in the way they were delivered—continuous and not overwrought.

The idea was not to conventionally reprise the conference content but instead to transcribe it. “We wanted to develop some kind of qualitatively based visualization of the discourse,” states Fisher. “Because of the kind of in-between nature of these texts, we tried to find typographic strategies that were analogous to building information modeling.” On the first page, a keyword cloud tallies recurrent words from a body of 30,000, and corresponding text is strewn, highlighted or repeated to exhibit its role. Words work doubletime in this newsprint foldout to truly redefine our understanding of the word contextual. by Marlena Bishop

Studio/lab | Designer: Jack Fisher | Client: American Institute of Architects | Contact: www.studiolab.com