Jose Manuel Vega turns Kanye West tweets into bold typographic posters

Barcelona-based brand and graphic designer Jose Manuel Vega has turned the wit and wisdom of Kanye West's tweets into a series of bold, black and white typographic posters. And through a clever mix of design and lettering, these posters channel the bombastic spirit of their inspiration.

Written By: Dom Carter

18 August 2022

Bold black and white typographic poster by Jose Manuel Vega featuring a Kanye West quote with heavily fragmented and layered letterforms that progressively dissolve downwards, with "START DOING" remaining legible at the bottom

Ah, Twitter. The popular social media site can be a useful resource for self-promotion as much as a phenomenal time drain. But one of the most interesting things about it is that even the biggest celebrities log in from time to time. And when you've got a creator as huge and outspoken as Kanye West sharing his thoughts in less than 280 characters, you know he's going to say something interesting.

It's the tweets of the rapper, record producer and fashion designer that inspired Jose Manuel Vega's latest project. In his new series of posters, he turns the wording of Kanye's tweets into clever graphics that capture the essence of the original message. Take, for example, 'love everyone', which sees the words blend into one another. When read horizontally and vertically, the two merge to convey the sentiment in a fresh, graphic way.

Black and white typographic poster by Jose Manuel Vega featuring the word "love" repeated and layered vertically to create a stacked pattern

Interlocking black and white typography spelling "fuck clout" with letters weaving together in an abstract geometric pattern by Jose Manuel Vega

Then there's the slightly more in-your-face tweet 'fuck clout', only in this poster, the two words weave together to disguise their meaning. They're still readable, though, thanks to a smart use of colour choice, but the intricate weaving of the letter shapes render them almost illegible, which is a suitable way of expressing the idea through type design.

Part design, part poster, part concrete poetry, these images are a neat distillation of Jose's love for design and hip-hop culture. During his eight years as a graphic designer, he has specialised in visual identities and typography design, all of which come into play here.

"My style is bold and minimal, using bright and vivid colours and limited colour palettes," he tells Creative Boom. "My mantras are 'Simplicity is the latest sophistication' and 'Trend is always late'." These snappy ideas could almost be Kanye tweets themselves.

Bold black and white typographic poster by Jose Manuel Vega spelling out "Leaders" and "Shit" with interlocking letters arranged vertically and horizontally around a white centre space

Bold black and white typographic poster reading "We are gods" with large interlocking letterforms designed by Jose Manuel Vega based on a Kanye West tweet

Bold black and white typographic poster by Jose Manuel Vega featuring interwoven vertical and diagonal letterforms from a Kanye West tweet, displayed with a social media post preview above it

He adds: "These posters are a curated selection of some of the most inspirational tweets from Kanye West turned into posters as a typographic exercise. To keep them consistent, I used the same colour palette and the same typeface on every poster."

To see the full selection of posters, which have been given the suitably grand name of The 10 Commandments of Kanye West, head over to the project page on Jose's Behance profile. There's also a link to his store, where you can pick up physical copies of each poster.