kristinbell.design.schizophrenia

Schizophrenia Typography Exploration

At the time of this writing, there are approximately 7.3 billion people on the planet, and approximately one percent of those people—73 million people—are living with schizophrenia, yet the general public knows very little about the illness, and what they do know is largely based on ideas that are wrong and stigmatizing. For this reason, I decided to undertake an anti-stigma-based typography project. The aim is to stimulate discussion and make people question their ideas about what schizophrenia is.

It is my hope, and the hope of many others, that opening up dialogues about mental illness will lead to less stigmatization and more understanding. Less stigmatization necessarily helps people to get the treatment they need, and it increases the importance of mental illness in the minds of the general public which can lead to better funding for research, treatment, and cures.

De-stigmatizing mental illness, especially schizophrenia, also means that people will begin to treat mental illness like any other illness. People living with the disease need the support and love of the community and those close to them in order to be successful in living with the disease, but because of stigma people with schizophrenia are often shunned, scapegoated, and villified. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be this way, and with effort we have the opportunity to educate and change the minds of people in important ways.

Finding Voice

I began this project with the idea of making greeting cards for people with mental illness. When someone gets some other kind of illness people are quick to offer meals and other comfort, but when someone has a mental illness, even in this day and age, what results is a lot of whispering and hand wringing.

While my experiments with the greeting card idea didn’t bear fruit for this project, what emerged from discussions with fellow designers was that I should speak from my own experience and with my own voice. This led me to reconfigure my message to one where I chose to directly confront the ideas that people have about schizophrenia, because I am part of that one percent of the population that has schizophrenia. My message is simple: schizophrenia is not what you imagine.

People living with schizophrenia run the gamut of the population. While the traditional images of people with schizophrenia are those of half-naked homeless people running around screaming at voices, the reality is much different.

Exploring Design

What emerged from meeting with the other designers was that I had some potential in a typographic treatment I had begun with the greeting cards in mind. For my process I chose the typeface Arno Pro, a nice clean, solid font, and I printed the characters out large, cut them out, manipulated them by cutting, folding, and gluing, and then photographed them. I then vectorized the letters in Illustrator. By pulling back in the design process and simply using the photographs of the letters rather than the vectorized version of them, I was able to add a layer of simplicty that was needed. I explored commercial placements (the billboard), artistic placements (the gallery), and web placements (the gif).

Check out the schizophrenia GIF here.