Typographic Research - DESIRE4

My second series is about BDSM. Before that, I only knew about SM culture from the film ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. Later, I learned from Netflix series ‘Bounding’ that SM culture is only part of it and a more complete interpretation should be divided into three parts, which are bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism. So I made the following posters combining these three themes.

In the first poster, I created entanglement between the letters.

I made the word Bondage and Discipline nested, connected and wound tightly together to express this certain kind of sexual state.

In the second poster, I give the two words a hierarchical relationship and extend the DOMINANCE word foot portion, creating a sense of control and oppression.

In the third poster, I personified the arrangement of letters.

In terms of font selection, I chose Didot because I first learned about BDSM when I was in high school. I bought a Vogue magazine and Didot has been used in Vogue for decades, which left me with the cultural impression that Didot is a very intellectual and emotional font.

I used a similar color scheme to create an ambiguous atmosphere and make the fonts in the poster partly hidden and partly visible. The reason that I chose very similar colors is that although there are dominant and submission sides in the BDSM model, the two are equal in this sexual relationship, which is often emphasized by the BDSM culture. Therefore, I tried to avoid primary and secondary relation between the two parties in my posters.