Aleksandr Rodchenko

Quinten Staples

12 min readMar 17, 2021

Initial Research

Notes on Stylistic Elements

San Serif or Slab Serif type
Use of red and black
Limited color use (1–2 colors)
Photomontage
Asymmetry
Strong Diagonals
White space
Negative space

Style Sheet

I wanted to pick a blocky sans-serif typeface or possibly a slab serif. I picked Rodchenko, Obvia, and Sinter. Rodchenko is probably the most similar to what was on some of Rodchenko’s posters. If I want to break away a little more I think I might use Obvia or Sinter. I like that they’re both a blocky shape and that they come with a lot of versatility as far as changing weights.

I will also probably pair which ever of the three I choose with another typeface to use for body type. For body type, my most likely choice is Helvetica or Neue Haas Grotesk. Rodchenko didn’t use type for larger bodies of text on his work often so it’s difficult to relate this back. I read that Rodchenko had a significant influence on the Bauhaus style which is associated with Helvetica.

Final Iterations

Booklet Process

3/24

At this point I wanted to go back and look for more source material and references. I feel like I’ve see most of Rodchenko’s work that’s easily accessible online. I plan on scanning new work from book pages. Also, I’ve been struggling with image resolution. There is not a lot of high resolution pictures of Rodchenko online and I think I’d rather use scans. In addition to this, I’ve been struggling with utilizing body text in a way that references Rodchenko. He rarely worked with smaller text during his career. I also started to collect references of work derivative of Rodchenko to see if it could help me come up with ideas for this.

3/25

Final

Process Continued