Studio Studio was invited by 3 sec Gallery to design a poster series for its roadside exhibition space, located at a parking site where the work is encountered by drivers passing at speed and by pedestrians approaching on foot. Two viewing distances, two reading speeds, one surface.
The project was developed from the working logic of Another Graphic, the typographic archive Studio Studio has been curating for around ten years, and it follows the same sequence used for the recently published research publication New Glyphs, New Writing: read the archive, extract a question, investigate, give the findings form within the Another Graphic visual system, and release the result. The archive served here as both source and method. Its grid and its custom typeface Monotesk, designed in-house with Emma Marichal, were carried directly into the project.
Given a short deadline and the need for a full series, the response was not a set of individual posters but a tool that generates them. A parametric grid engine was built to govern layout, scale, spacing, rhythm and density, held together by a limited set of controls, size, contrast, columns and rows, that allow each composition to vary while the system itself remains cohesive. AI was used during development to accelerate prototyping and to adapt the tool to new formats and constraints as they arose. On export, a thin frame is placed around each artwork that prints the exact parameters used to generate it, so that every poster carries the settings of its own composition and can be reproduced from them.
The site-specific brief was translated into the typographic logic of the posters through a pair of scales: macrotype for distance, microtype for proximity. Each poster takes a single letter from a co-written sentence, We choose light open near paths to build and give today now, and sets it in macrotype, with its antonym set in microtype inside the letterform. The W of We is built from the word They; the C of Choose is built from the word Reject. At driving speed the macro letter reads instantly; at walking distance the microtype resolves into layered detail. The monochrome palette met the deadline and works as a visual analogue to the oppositional logic of the antonyms.
The tool remains publicly accessible at studiostudio.be/3secgraphic, where new compositions can be generated within the same framework. The series is one possible output. By adjusting the constraints or adding parameters, the same system can be reopened to produce further iterations.
Photos by Edwin Wiekens.
