“An Ode To A Dictionary” takes a spin on Pablo Neruda’s poem of the same name, reflecting on the intricate perception of language and culture and its development through the early stages of childhood. In our youth, we typically recognize the dictionary often as terrifying and overwhelming with its dense and complex words. Through the marks we inscribe, the dictionary develops over time into an archive–a timeless artifact, stretching through years of unique history. The sketches are raw and become organisms, living and breathing to comprehend our understanding of the world.

The design was based on the Vietnamese-to-English dictionary my mother utilized as an immigrant fresh off the coasts of Vietnam. Today, I utilize the same dictionary to visualize the poem through the manipulation of typography and unrefined imagery. 

The typography is playful, deliberately shifting between various weights, styles, and colors to bring life and meaning to the words that build the poem. It served as a visual aspect of the book while recognizing text as a significant component of the dictionary. The typefaces included in this project were Impact, a heavy sans-serif font that resembled the cover of my mother’s dictionary, and Georgia, a classic serif font that can be found on most dictionary pages. 

In conjunction with the typography, the unrefined or non-textual imagery was loosely drawn from the dictionary pages I scribbled on as a child. The crayon-like strokes and the sketch-like style served to create a strong sense of childlike playfulness, thus infantilizing the dictionary as an object of childlike understanding. To further strip the dictionary away from its highly academic associations, I restricted myself from metaphorically interpreting or dissecting the poem in the drawings. Instead, I wanted the drawings to be a more direct or literal interpretation of the poem, taking each line and word for what they are.