Danielle Rosales and Robin Coenen (visual intelligence) are designers who explore reading material as a visual, structural and interpretive process. Robin Coenen used his own reading of an asemic text by Jim Leftwich as a case study to develop a manual for dealing with the unreadable. By systematically documenting each step of his approach to the text in a strict, pre-formatted template, his perspective becomes tangible: He interacts with text as a visual system of atomic elements and spaces, rather than as a meaningful composition of symbols. His mappings consider the material and typographic aspects of text, ranging from stroke weight and spacing to line density, composition, white space and contrast.
In a workshop, Danielle Rosales and Robin Coenen invited participants to engage with Leftwich's text themselves, seeking their own insights through artistic visual analysis, while documenting the reading process with mappings following the same template. Watch the video to see some impressions from the workshop and visit the interactive website to explore different readings of the text.
The manual for reading the unreadable is available for download here.