Tjaša Cizej’s experimental work blurs the boundaries between the readable and unreadable

The Slovenian graphic designer Tjaša Cizej works primarily with printed matter, but she does all of her design work digitally. With a focus on typography, colour and shape her creative process turns to the compositional cornerstones of graphic design with a refreshingly playful approach: “I often create my own typographical arrangements, either by designing characters from scratch or modifying existing typefaces – or a combination of both,” Tjaša tells us. The designer moulds many of these found letterforms into simple geometric shapes that slot neatly into, or deviate from her grids.

“I’m happy when I can achieve an interesting dialogue between all these elements – I wouldn’t say I’m trying to achieve harmony, but more to play with the components and create something unexpected, even if sometimes it might look slightly off,” she says. These compositions come from being quite instinctive, she tells us, and often taking something from her day-to-day life and creating a new context for it – like bits of conversations, or a photo a friend took. For Tjaša this means she‘s always quite surprised by the results, as she tends to let her natural creative process lead the way.

A lot of Tjaša’s work takes a different view on legibility. The designer likes to put her own spin on the suits our words wear – “I like to see how far I can go with it,” she says. “How much can a character be modified and still be recognisable? What spaces are created by pushing and blurring these boundaries?” You’ll never know what form her letters might take next, they might come in a cascade of stretched and squashed shapes or neatly spell something out inside a colourful caterpillar. Whether you are trying to read them or not, they are rather lovely to look at.