Typography and Graphics – Alice in Wonderland

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll has been made object of various interpretations. One of them suggests that the most famous characters of the novel, such as the Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, are actually representations of different mental illnesses, for example the Borderline Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Furthermore, some diseases have been named after the book’s characters: it is the case of the White Rabbit Syndrome and the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. My intention is to represent the main characters, emphasising the disease they stand for. In order to achieve this purpose, different “typographic rules” are given for each glyph illustration, which are based on John Tenniel’s original drawings. For example, when Alice drinks from the Drink-me-bottle and then eats the Eat-me-cake, she suddenly has a feeling of shrinkage and then a feeling of levitation. Both are considered symptoms of the so-called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, a condition which causes a distortion in visual perception, making an object, a part of the body or even one’s entire body seem smaller, bigger, closer or farther away than it actually is. To represent these alterations in the perception of sizes, I illustrated Alice using stretched characters: the use of stretched character becomes here the typographic rule for the Alice in Wonderland Disease.

Beside the main project, I show here two exercises: the first one is a glyph illustration for a T-shirt, which includes a quotation from the book; in the second exercise, the quotations have instead the purpose to show the main rules and concepts of typography, in a set of A5 cards.