Finding your own voice

E koekoe te tūī, e ketekete te kākā, e kūkū te kererū. (The tūī chatters, the kākā cackles, the kererū coos.) The appeal of printed matter extends beyond the visual to include the ability to convey voice and emotion. Much like ‘vocal inflexion’ in spoken language, type and typography imbue content with a unique tone or ‘voice’. Using the above Māori whakataukī (‘proverb’) as a metaphor to investigate typographic voice, we devised a new twelve-week course which invites students to create a multi-sectional publication responding to endemic birds. Birds are symbolic creatures in Māori mythology and hold a special place in te ao Māori (world-view). As tauiwi kaiako (‘non-Māori teachers’) entrusted with the responsibility to design resources that honour an Indigenous partnership under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the whakataukī acts as a catalyst to develop an inclusive curriculum. The syllabus for this introductory article is pedagogically structured to scaffold students’ learning. Built as a sequence of analogue and digital exercises, students are encouraged to explore distinct compositional strategies relevant to six diverse types of content: (1) creating dynamic text forms to reflect poetry, (2) generating typographic patterns with letterforms to represent birdsong, (3) integrating letterforms with images to create expressive descriptions, (4) using hierarchy to establish structure within long-form text, (5) using expressive text to depict symbolism and significance in culture and (6) composing fluid lines of text to express rhythm within a song. The resulting multi-sectional publications also reflect the whakataukī by bringing together distinctive print and typographic formats into a cohesive publication – a collective ‘chorus’ of different typographic voices. This article unpacks examples of student work to elucidate learning and successes, highlighting practical challenges of teaching diverse students and introducing them to a conceptual framework for a communication design project through the metaphor of ‘voice’.