The D Word: Yomar Augusto

Yomar Augusto is a skilled typographer, type designer, and calligrapher. His work is more an afront to design standards than it is a slave to those rigors. To judge from these multi-layered sketches, he is not afraid to combine incongruous graphic forms—either by design or accident. He accepts that there is beauty in clutter and pleasure in the serendipidous forms that emerge from it. 

The lettering work of these pages started like any process for a commercial job, specifically a book cover for a Dutch author. “I kept the sketches and used them as a base for a letterpress workshop at the Center for Book Arts,” he said. Then, after a couple of days printing layer upon layer, “I’ve realised how the sketches became final pieces.” The final is visual proof of what Augusto says about the design process: “Ugly design is something I do everyday, ugly into beautiful … a process. A rough rock that needs to be polished.”

When pressed about the concept of anti-design his response is not as optimistic “I think it is something else; it means going against the system or “brand-ization/globalization” of our lives.” Rather working in this indiscriminate fashion, mixing the unmixable is play and abandon that results in polish.