\u201cI\u2019ve been obsessed with gossip since forever. I\u2019m a very relationship oriented person, with my love and care for my friends & community (and vice versa) being quite a big value driver,\u201d says Deborah. \u201cGossip to me is far from a bad thing, but rather a tool that communities use to understand and uphold their own values, shared beliefs and to be able to take care of one another through knowing what\u2019s going on in each other\u2019s lives.\u201d Determined to make a meaningful commentary on gossip through typography, Deborah researched how gossip has been demonised by \u201cthe church and the patriarchy to keep women silent\u201d in the 16th and 17th centuries. Gossip can be seen as threatening, but also useful because it\u2019s informal. Not only can it evade censorship, it also exists outside of the concrete nature of the written word \u2013 instead, gossip is fleeting, personal and untraceable. \u201cI\u2019ve also been calling gossip a craft, rather than an art, because I think it\u2019s a skill to master and understand,\u201d says Deborah.<\/p>\n
In Deborah\u2019s book Gossip: An Investigation Into The Feminine Art Of Conversation<\/a>, the relationship between textiles and gossip is central. Whilst taking a textiles class, Deborah learned about historical safe spaces where women were allowed to gather together without men \u2013 these were usually crafting spaces \u2013 and Deborah hypothesised that, due to arduous long shifts of knitting, weaving and embroidery, this is where gossip prevailed.<\/p>\n Gossip is also a revival of sorts. Gutenberg\u2019s Textura was the first font he made with a moveable type to typeset the Bible in. Shortly after, blackletter became a key part of visual communication for its permanence and weight, but in Deborah\u2019s view, it\u2019s linked to histories of control, which gossip naturally challenges. In a humorous twist, Deborah takes the font made for the Bible and sets a font related to gossip in it, reclaiming the church\u2019s demonisations of groups and unions whilst creating a typeface that is accessible across the digital and the analogue.<\/p>\n Deborah used program Glyphs to create something that resembled 16th century designs for lace and embroidery<\/a> as well as keyboard mapped versions of Susan Kare\u2019s Cairo glyphset<\/a>, using the pixel map just like gridded paper. \u201cSince weaving and punchcard knitting is known to be some of the first \u2018coding\u2019 that we have, it\u2019s what led to the binary system of code, Ada Lovelace with the first computer, and all that good stuff,\u201d says Deborah. \u201cThere\u2019s already a natural relationship between textiles and computers, so to have these pixels of our web and textiles also overlap is just \u2018chef\u2019s kiss\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019ve been obsessed with gossip since forever. I\u2019m a very relationship oriented person, with my love and care…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-237186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}